A guest post by John, who blogs at Shifting Beliefs.
My journey towards deconversion started slowly around 2008. I had been discussing the teaching about tithing with a friend of mine. We had some disagreements about the subject so I went into a very in-depth study about tithing. Long story short, what I had been taught in various churches, and what I had taught as well, didn’t line up with what the Bible says and doesn’t say about tithing. Then I started wondering, what else does the Bible say and not say regarding different topics? The more I read the Bible without the church lenses and learned to think critically, the less and less it made sense. I would say my deconversion probably took about eight years total. In some ways, it’s still happening.
On this side of things, Christianity really doesn’t make much sense anymore. At least not to me. Starting right off the bat with the creation story. god creates everything, ending with man and woman as the last thing created. He puts them in a utopia, creates a tree that they are not supposed to eat from, and puts it right in the middle of the garden. Then a talking snake convinces Eve, who convinces Adam, to eat the fruit from it. Thus dooming mankind to sin and sickness and death and eviction from the garden. Surely, with God being all-knowing, he knew that’s what would happen, right? So why do it? Then there is the part about them “realizing” they were naked and god having to make clothes for them. Soon after, Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel, god gets pissed and sends him on his way to the land of Nod. There apparently are people here because Cain gets married and had kids. Where the hell did these people come from?
A while later, Genesis talks about the sons of god who started hooking up with human women. There is much speculation on who the sons of god were. But anyway, the women apparently gave birth to giants. Then god decided that all the humans were wicked to the bone and regretted making them. What? Again, did he not know this was going to happen? And so he decides to kill all the humans and animals on the earth, except Noah and his family, and just start over. Looking past the fact that he is committing genocide, let’s look at how he does it. He could have done a Thanos and snapped his finger and just wiped out the humans and the animals. Quick and painless. But, that’s not how he chooses to do it. He’s going to drown all the humans and animals. It’s not only a slow death, but a terrifying one as well. Can you imagine the panic and terror that all the humans and animals went through? That’s a sick mother fucker, right there! God is good, my ass!
Then there are all the people and animals that god had his people kill later on because they wouldn’t worship the right god.
Skipping ahead to the new testament: you can do a simple Google search to find all the inconsistencies in the gospels and throughout the rest of the new testament, so I won’t go into those. Do you remember the story of Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts? The believers had decided to put a commune together and sell all their stuff and put it in a joint account. Ananias and Sapphira lied about how much they sold the land for and god killed them for it. God will kill someone for lying but he allows thousands of children to be molested by clergy around the world on a regular basis. What . . . the . . . fuck?! The god you read about in the bible versus the god of today’s real-life doesn’t line up at all. The Bible tells about Jesus and the apostles healing people all the time. The accounts of “healing” that I’ve run into, I’m skeptical. How about some folks with ALS getting healed or amputees’ limbs growing back? That would get me back to drinking the Kool-Aid again! All the stories and “accounts” through the Bible just don’t make sense to me anymore.
The fact that there are at least 200 Christian denominations in the US and something like 40,000 worldwide doesn’t make sense. Surely if the Bible is the “word of god”, god could communicate the same truth to all Christians. Right?
And what about the idea of a literal hell. Even though god has quite a long history of killing people, the Bible states in many places that he is good and his mercy endures forever. Huh. That’s interesting. Supposedly, god is love and 1 Corinthians 13 describes what this love looks like. In case you are not familiar with these verses, they go something like this: Love is patient, kind, does not envy, does not boast, it is not proud, does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. It keeps no record of wrongs. Oh really? Adam and Eve, the genocide of the human race, the slaughter of multiple groups of people, and the doctrine of hell all say otherwise.
And if a person studies the history of the Bible, how it came to be, the historical and scientific accuracy of the Bible (or lack thereof), and so on . . . it doesn’t make sense!
This post only scratches the surface of what no longer makes sense to me about religion, specifically Christianity. I’m not 100% convinced that there is no deity/god of any kind. I don’t think that can be proven either way. But I am pretty damn sure that if there is one god, or many, it/he/she/they are not the god of the Bible or Christianity. Or of any other holy book that’s ever existed. I think part of the reason religions exist is that they are man’s way of trying to describe something that is indescribable.
I still really like this quote by Barry Taylor, a road manager for AC/DC, “God is the name of the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.”
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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These are all great points. Sometimes I wonder if people who weren’t raised in a version of Christianity that teaches that the stories are all historically accurate and true are more likely to stay in Christianity than those who are taught literalism.
I like that Barry Taylor quote!
When you finally work your way out of religion and spew out your former beliefs in this manner it sounds ridiculous. Yet this is what we really believed. I remember when Tina Fey did her Sara Palin impression using only her specific words. It was hilarious and clearly showed how inept and unqualified she was without exaggeration. Similarly when you simply state religious dogma there is nothing else that shows how foolish it really is.
Or it doesn’t make sense and sounds foolish because it actually doesn’t make sense and sounds foolish.
Your comment reinforces the belief that many Christians check reason, skepticism, and common sense at the door of life.
Bruce, is RF a drive-by or did they actually read any of your stuff?
He’s a drive-by. Read all of one post. 😢
Your bio says you “left Christianity.” You “left” because you never were a Christian to begin with. We’ll be praying for you.
😂😂Wow, you are first person to tell me this. 😂😂
You are so lazy that you didn’t even bother to read any of my autobiographical writing ✍️ before rendering judgment.
http://brucegerencser.net/why/
You know what God says about your behavior?
Answering before listening is both stupid and rude. Proverbs 18:13
Repent! 😈😈
Try harder, Robert and Anne, try harder.
You join thousands of others who “said” they were praying for me, proving that nothing fails like prayer. God knows exactly where I am. She even has my email address and text number. Why would God need a middleman like you to get between me and the Big Kahuna? Here I am Lord. Let’s do dinner. You’re buying. 😈
Admit it, Robert and/or Anne: You’re scared, aren’t you? If Bruce could lose his faith, after all those years of hard work, it could happen to you too. That’s why all of you pathetic prayer warriors have no problem with publicly bearing false witness against total strangers.
Because you’re scared. Absolutely effin’ terrified that you’ll just wake up one morning and won’t love Jesus anymore, and your ticket to heaven will be revoked.
If it’s any consolation, it’s too late for that already. No matter how hard you pray, one day you will pass away. In that moment your faith will be gone. G.O.N.E. Dead people don’t feel, don’t think, don’t love because the brain that gave life to their beliefs will no longer be online. You won’t even know that you never made it to heaven.
So grow up, already. Put aside childish things like dreams of eternal life in Yahweh’s Happy Fun Land, and come join us in the real world. (Oh, and get yourself individual email accounts, while you’re at it, too, It’s hard not to imagine one of you leaning over the other’s shoulder, “correcting” their work.)
Robert and Anne, I’m not sure if you were commenting to Bruce or myself. As for myself, I completely believed everything that I was taught by evangelical Christianity and every word of the Bible, for 30 years. I prayed the sinner’s prayer for my salvation. I was filled with the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. I sought God and his will every day of those 30 years. I prayed for the sick for healing. I prayed with multiple people to receive Jesus and to be filled with the HS. I turned my life upside down and inside out to do what I perceived at the time to be His will. Anytime questions entered my mind regarding my beliefs, I read the Bible more and prayed more to come against this attack of the enemy. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover at least 15 times in 30 years, and many, many scriptures hundreds of times, committing huge sections of the Bible to memory. It was an intense, 2 year study of the scriptures, the history of the Bible and of the church, that led me to becoming an atheist.
This common bullshit line of, you were never a true Christian to begin with, is laughable. Don’t assume that you know me or what I believed with all my heart and mind for 3 decades. Did you receive some divine clairvoyance from God that let you see what my deepest beliefs were for those 30 years? Or are you just parroting the same shitty responses that most Christians are taught to throw out there? I was brainwashed to answer with the same shitty responses. So I’m more inclined to believe that than you getting some divine insight from a god.
Yes, please pray for me. It will continue to prove how much of a waste of time it is.
“You were never a Christian to begin with…” Please stop saying this to people. It shows ignorance and your arrogance.
John, your description mirrors mine, over 50 years a fervent x-tian, church worker, children’s evangelist and more. Whilst in the process of realising it was all a fiction, I worried that satan was tempting me. And that maybe I never was a True X-tian, but couldn’t figure out how to get to be one if I wasn’t one already Then I found a quote from Neil Carter’s blog that helped me so much, was just what I needed to hear. He said ‘We didn’t deconvert because we were lukewarm x-tians, but because we jesus-ed our socks off 24/7 and realised with mounting horror and extreme reluctance, that it didn’t make sense. It was all a fiction.’
To RF and to R and A: we don’t shriek at the ceiling here (aka pray) but hope fervently you can open your closed minds just a little and step out of your darkness. Life’s great out here in the sunshine. As Bruce once said ‘We have found the Promised Land, why would we return to Egypt?’ I can personally testify every day to a verse from your Iron Age/Bronze Age book of fairy tales, John 8:32, the truth, freedom from religion, has made me free indeed!
We here at Bruce Gerencser’s blog community are well aware of the No True Scotsman fallacy. If you don’t know what that is, google it. That’s the logical error you’re demonstrating here.
So, Revival Fires, you’re okay with letting someone else dies in your place?
Sucks to be you. 😀
Vile comment deleted
To the drive-by evangelists, consider that “Of course it sounds foolish, here are are the Bible verses that say if you don’t have faith, it will sound foolish…”
To the Bible quote mavens who want to remind us that the fool, in his heart, says that there’s no God…
Consider that every scam run since probably the time of the first members of the genus Homo tells people that they’re foolish for not buying in. And oh, hey, if you buy in, by the way, it will cost you. Time. Money. Relationships. Health. And oh, hey again, we will deny that any of those costs really exist, because if you BELIEVE, you’ll give those things freely!
For those of us who escaped, it is so breathtakingly clearly a con. Not that everyone involved is part of the con; a good con drags in a lot of folks, either by sales talk or by upbringing, who will perpetuate it. Most Christians are not con artists. The social structures created by their religious variants serve to perpetuate the con, long after the people who started it are gone. Oh, and I’m not even calling the first Christian evangelists (Like Paul) con artists. He had to bust his rear to get that religion off the ground, he was not just a true believer but a visionary. Except that the human brain is quite capable of producing all that visionary stuff on its own, no supernatural support required.
Folks, it’s been a couple of millennia. It’s been demonstrated over and over again to be a con, easily manipulated by those in power and the power-seeking. Perhaps the longevity of a religion is dependent upon how well it can be used by authorities who want to manipulate people.
Friends here, I apologize if my opinion bothers you, because it’s more outspoken than most of my stuff (and I’m rarely not outspoken!), but I was writing about this in a fictional context tonight, and this is where my head is on the subject. I’m not a strong atheist, I don’t deny the existence of deities, I simply don’t see evidence for them. But I’ve read enough to understand how easily people are used through the vehicle of religion.
I’m so honored to have received a response from Revival Fires who presumes that I have never heard these scriptures. In fact I was a born again Christian for many years. I believed I had the truth, was guided by the holy spirit and most of the world was going to hell. I defended the inconsistencies in the Bible and rationalized the failure of god to answer any of my prayers. I blamed free will for all of the pain and suffering in the world. I watched Christians act no better than all of the rest of the world and gave them a free pass. But little by little my defenses started to fall and I began to see that I was believing a fairy tale and despite crying out to god in desperation many times I received only silence in return. This took years and I now look back at my former beliefs and can’t believe I ever fell for that nonsense. So RF a few magical Bible verses won’t break the spell. Once you see that the emperor has no clothes you’ll never stop seeing him naked.
And I forgot to say Happy Christian Asshole Day to you.
Atheists reject your presuppositions — the existence of your peculiar deity, the Bible is an authoritative supernatural book, the existence of Heaven an Hell, humans are sinners in need of salvation — out of hand. You have no evidence for your claims except Bible quotations and personal opinion. Please provide empirical evidence for the existence the Christian God and an afterlife. You want us to change our whole lives, so surely you can provide us verifiable evidence to justify your demand that we repent and believe the gospel. And please, personal testimony or proof texting doesn’t count.
Let me be clear, I don’t fear facing your mythical God on some mythical judgment day so I can ultimately be sentenced to eternity in a mythical Hell. It would be silly for me to fear a mythical being, yes? The only person I fear is my wife. 😂😂 And I like it when she “punishes” me. 😈😈😂😂
Besides, you are are going to end up in the Lake of Fire too.
The Bible says in Revelation 21:8:
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
You are a liar. Every commenter is required to use a real email address. You refuse to do so, using multiple fake email addresses instead. You are going to burn forever, Dude. 😢😈😈😂😂🤡🤡
Your threat against us has been noted, Revival Fires. You’re a vicious-minded asshole who enjoys frightening people with woo-woo tales of a “loving” god who likes to torture sentient beings for eternity.
May you lose your faith and never regain it.
“ It doesn’t work if you don’t believe” – Violet Devereaux
“All who died as a baby or small child will live eternally with him in heaven! Including those murdered in the womb!”
Funny that this belief, small children automatically receiving salvation, was never really a widepsread belief in Western Christendom until the Baptists came along with the “age of accountability” concept.
Catholics and Lutherans insist on paedobaptism for the remission of (original) sins. As usual, certain Christians think that Christianity begins with them and that God is lucky that they have everything figured out.
What if you get to the gates of heaven only to be told that God was just testing human gullibility and that, actually, only atheists are to be admitted? I can guarantee that you are unable to answer this question.
Or testing human courage, seeing who would take responsibility for their own behaviour and who would fail the test by accepting Jesus as a proxy fall guy?
John, I love the Barry Taylor quote, and you make great points. I had to chuckle when you talked about amputees growing back their limbs or folks with ALS being cured: In a guest post about a year ago, I wrote about going to Lourdes (It was along the route of a bicycle tour I took from France into Spain and back) and watching to see whether anyone took of the waters and tossed aside their crutches. Mind you, I had all but entirely lost my belief in any god by that time, but I wanted to see whether any “miracle” would happen.
Which brings me to something else you mentioned: Your deconversion process took years. I think that’s how it is for many of us. Although I haven’t believed in a long time, there are times when I still think I’m deconverting because I was so inculcated, not just with the beliefs, but with the ways of thinking (or not) and cultural practices that go with them: They are the detritus of the Catholicism in which I was raised and the Evangelical Christianity I espoused in my late adolescence and early adulthood. Sometimes I think that I’ll spend the rest of my life “deconverting.” That’s OK: When something is so ingrained in us at an early age, it doesn’t go away when we snap our fingers.
MJ Lisbeth, you are absolutely right. All that indoctrination doesn’t go away with the snap of our fingers. Sometimes I think, shouldn’t I be over this by now? But 30 plus years of brainwashing takes time to undo and heal from.
I have a co-worker who is Catholic and she went on a trip to Lourdes with other Catholics who had illnesses of all kinds, many incurable. At one point after she returned, I did ask her if she knew of anyone who got healed there. It was a legitimate question. Part of me was hoping that she would say yes. But, she said she wasn’t aware of anyone who was healed. Of course, there are undocumented stories of plenty of people who have been healed there. Just like the Bible.