Waving, not drowning - Testimonies of Ex-Christians

Amazon.com Widgets

Waving, not drowning

.: posted 3/11/2004 ::: by webmdave :::

sent in by J. Grant

I was brought into a Christian denomination because my family was poor. We were 4 kids, divorced mother, living on welfare, and lemme tell ya - that scenario is no treat, no matter what a lot of people think. We often didn't have food, and we lived at a level of poverty most people wouldn't believe still exists in America.

I was a believer. The church offered us food and clothing, got us into a better house, and baptised us. I was raised thinking Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost were all as real as the chair I'm sitting on now. I lived righteously, never smoked, never listened to "evil music", and a slipped word of profanity sent me running for a prayer. I wanted to live right, and go to heaven.

Looking back, it's hard to believe I was ever that kid.

When I was 15, I had my first real girlfriend. We'd been dating for 8 months when she was raped out in the woods. We'd never had sex. She lived with only minor injuries physically, but the psychological scarring hurt her. A lot.

I prayed night and day on this. One night, walking alone with a very atheist friend, I confided in him what was going on. I felt like God had let me down. I'd lived as perfectly as I could for 8 years, and although I'd believed everything was part of God's plan, I couldn't figure where God's Plan required my girlfriend to live through somehting like that.

My bro turned to me, lighting a cigarette, and with a wry smirk muttered "You sure hinge a lot on God's plan. If there's no God at all, you're going to be one sad m*therf*cker when you die."

Those words stuck with me all night. I knelt to pray before bed, and where I usually felt a connection, I felt nothing at all.

The next morning I tried again, but for the first time in eight years, I felt ridiculous even attempting to pray. It was the last time I tried in my life, at least to God and Jesus.

The sudden realization that you've spent years of your life imagining daily communication with a higher being is a hard one. But I accept my truths as they come, no matter how uncomfortable. I've never looked back, so to speak.

My realization DID drive me to make a lifelong hobby of studying religions from around the world, not as a believeer, but historically. It has taught me a great deal about humans and our need to invent gods. I've also stumbled across a few things that I believe may actually exist, but I don't worship or pray or follow anything. I call myself agnostic, because i maintain that there MAY be higher beings at work - I've just never found solid evidence of them, and they don't seem to much care what goes on here on earth. By the same token, I maintain that the atheists may be right as well. Either way, I won't know until it's too damned late to do anything about it.

I do know one thing - I have never found ANYTHING in all my studies that has led me to believe that Christianity is anything more than a very contrived, false religion. I'm not saying that all Christians are evil - many modern Christian organizations do good work with people. I've met many people I would call excellent Christians - I just keep in mind that they have a personal delusion that does not drive them to commit evil acts to others. There are also people who adhere to the Bible as a tome of Strict Rules, and these folks are damned silly at best, lethally dangerous at worst.

I merely refuse to live under that particular delusion.

Sex: Male
URL: http://jameslgrant.com
City: Dallas
State: TX
Country: USA
Became a Christian: 7
Ceased being a Christian: 15
Labels before: Baptised, Christian
Labels now: Agnostic, Hedonist
Why I joined: Family
Why I left: Loss of faith

Add this page to:

0 Comments:

The first 200 comments appear here under the article. If over 200 comments are posted, click on the "newer" and "newest" links on the Post a Comment page to continue reading the latest comments.

Post a Comment | Create a Link | Post in the Forums | Permalink

Subscribe to this post's Comments (Atom).
Subscribe to every post's Comments (RSS).
Quickly catch up on all recent comments posted on ExChristian.Net on the Recent Comments page. Or, keep track of comments on individual topics by using .