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, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 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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