My House of Cards Is Falling
- Sparkling Diamond
- Jan 2
- 7 min read
This is just an impromptu post because I'm trying to process where I'm at with religion, Christianity in particular...I want to talk about it but this is about the safest space I can think of to try to put my thoughts into words without them just staying stuck inside of me. I'm putting myself out there, and in a way risking myself, to put this out like this. I had someone tell me that the sad part of deconstruction is that people often walk away from Jesus. I don't intend to cause anyone grief or pain by sharing what I do but this is my journey and I hope you can bear with me and at least try to understand that I didn't willingly choose this path. It's almost like I was destined to go this direction and while I don't understand why right now I know that this is where I'm supposed to be. No matter which way I would have tried to go I would have eventually ended up here I think...
Right now the biggest thing I feel is grief and a sense of freedom to be myself. It feels rather contradictory but it is what I'm feeling. It took a bit to figure out what I'm feeling. In fact, I didn't sleep well at all last night with this milling around inside of me.
The other day someone was telling me how God this and God that and I didn't know how to respond. How was I to say that I don't think I believe that the god of the Bible is real anymore? I have been listening to a lot debates and people arguing for and against the god of the Bible. I've been listening to logical arguments. I've been pondering the questions I've had since I was a child about God and the Bible and who the Bible says God is. I've been holding the Bible at arm's length and looking at the track record of God. I've been looking at the things that contradict each other and Christian arguments and efforts to rationalize away the inconsistencies to make it make sense. The more I look at the whole theme and scheme of things the more I am unconvinced that it's actually a real story. And the more it becomes a myth like all the other religions that Christianity considers to be false and mythical. All the things I'm learning as well about trauma and abuse don't help either because I keep seeing more and more red flags in the god of the Bible and honestly I don't even want to be around him or even let him get near to me because a good parent would not even treat their own kids as horrible as the god of the Bible does.
So this morning I find myself feeling a lot of grief. I told a friend last night that I believe that there is a creator of the universe but I don't think the god of the Bible is real anymore. It took till this morning to fully realize the implications of that statement. The grief. The death of the god I thought was real my whole life. (Along with that comes the fear of rejection for not believing. The fear of others trying to manipulate or scare me back into Christianity. The fear of losing what few friends I have.) The death of hell and everlasting torment. The death of heaven as per the Bible. The death of my beliefs and desires about the god of the Bible which in a way have already been replaced to a certain extent with other beliefs without me even realizing it.
Christianity as I have known it has become like a house of cards that I'm desperately trying to keep upright but the more I try to find the truth and validity of it the more holes appear and the more it crumbles to pieces. In that space I feel two polarizing things. Mostly I feel grief and loss. Like I've wasted so much of my life trying to serve a god that has a bad track record. But I didn't know any better. Cognitive dissonance kept me from seeing the whole picture and the ugliness of it. Yes, I had questions but I didn't know how to find the answers and probably deep down I was scared too of the answers and how they would affect my world view. So much grief. And deep loss. Of what I had been taught was true but now I can't seem to find a way to keep it as truth because the validity of it crumbles on itself and the Bible gets a lot of things wrong such as the geography of the world. There's the verse about God not being the author of confusion and yet he himself contradicts himself so many times with his own words.
How can I trust in a god that condones slavery? Why would I want to love a god who doesn't allow women and children to have autonomy? If the resurrection really happened then why are there no secular documents to verify it? Where does it say Jesus actually was god? Why did Jesus not fulfill any prophecies if he was the Messiah because a little research will show that the prophecies Jesus was said to have fulfilled have been taken out of context of the Old Testament? Why does the god of the Old testament have such sexual fantasies about Israel and others? Why is it that some parts of the Bible have been taken from other ancient texts? Anyone who has had rumors come around about them knows how fast stories change from true to untrue, and if that is how word of mouth works, how can we know that the stories of the Bible are true because they have been handed down orally many generations before ever being written down? Even the gospels are known to not have been written down by eye witnesses but were passed down several hundred years before being written down. Who were the people Cain was afraid would kill him? Who was his wife? Technically, according to the Bible there would have only been 4 people on the earth. Why is the god of the Bible the one who kills millions and millions of innocent people through the ages (genocide just like Hitler and other leaders have)and yet Satan is the one portrayed as the evil one? Somehow the math just isn't matching...
I don't ask these things for you to answer them. It is just to write out the questions I have been grappling with lately, some of which I have had since I was a young child old enough to understand what I was reading. I'm not sharing all this for you to respond in any way. I'm not asking for a debate about what is true or not true. I'm just verbalizing my struggle with what I'm seeing and what I was taught/told.
On the other hand, I feel free. Free to be myself. Free to create beauty wherever I go. Free to enjoy life without worrying about whether I'm pleasing God or not. Free to follow my intuition and desires which are for the good of all things. Free to enjoy and explore so many good things. Free to experience awe and delight about the smallest things to the most beautiful and unexplainable things of the universe. Free to explore the things I am drawn to without being afraid I am doing something wrong. I feel free. Free from fear. Free from worry. Free from restrictions. Free from control. Free from coercion and manipulation.
So many Christians think that the absence of the god of the Bible means the license to do anything like sexual immorality or addictions that harm the body or others. I hope none of you thinks that, but if you catch yourself thinking that about me, then I think I can say you really don't know me. Yes, I'm human and I do make mistakes but I think it's kinda like someone I listened to who said something along these lines: we think that morality comes with believing in a god, but in reality, who we are at heart is our morality. Religion just squashes it into a certain definable definition which is why so many think that being without God means being without morals.
I have hidden so much of who I really am for my whole life because the darkness tried to squeeze it out of me. They couldn't stand the light. The purity. The beauty. They tried to stomp it out of me and so it's been in hiding. Most of the time I didn't even know who I really was/am either because it was so hidden from even me. But by now, some of you have seen the glimmers and light shining forth through the things I've created and written. There's more to come. I can feel it as I write this. It's like a dazzling pure light coming from within. The very essence of life. How this is possible I don't know. How this is even possible aside from the god of the Bible that's supposedly the only true god defies my understanding. This is a surprise to me just in writing this. It brings tears to my eyes. I feel so alive. So free. I don't understand but I trust the process and I am even more certain that I am right where I am supposed to be.
Now I will go and enjoy my day and I hope you will bear with me on my journey and that you will stay around to watch the journey unfold. And for those who want to look into the arguments and debates I've been looking at for themselves here are the two YouTube channels that I've found the most down to earth:
Deconstruction Zone
Mindshift
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