How Losing My Faith Led Me to God
One believer puts aside his childhood religion
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I was just a child when I first began learning about Christianity in my hometown in North Carolina, but I was soon faced with a powerful choice: Would I accept Jesus Christ into my heart as my own personal savior?
It is the single most powerful question a Christian can ask a person. If you say yes, you get into Heaven after you die. It is that simple: you have to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that he took flesh, that he sacrificed himself for the rest of us, that he was crucified for the rest of us, that he died so that our sins would be absolved. You have to believe that he rose from the dead, and that he is going to return. You also have to believe that if you don’t believe, if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your own personal savior, you will burn in hell for eternity. You have to believe that there truly are good people and bad people, and that the bad people will be forever punished for being unrepentant non-believers.
I believed all of that back then. I rejected it in college, with some trepidation. I don’t believe any of it now. And that is why I believe in God again.
I no longer believe in the creation story. I have real problems with some of the New Testament, and I flat out don’t believe any part of Revelations. I don’t believe that God will judge us, and I don’t believe that sinners will burn in an unending Lake of Fire for all eternity. I don’t want to believe that there are some people who will be spared, and some people who will have to endure eternal torture. That is something I can neither internalize nor rationalize.
Praying because I want to
It was only when I shrugged off the doctrines I had grown up with that I found God again. I remember the day a few months ago when I first got on my knees again and put my head down and interlocked my hands so that they looked like one massive fist. I needed it. I needed to pray. I needed someone to listen to my problems, to have them out there in the ether. And I had to believe that those problems would be heard. I pray every night now. I pray to thank God that I had a good day, and to ask that I please have a good day tomorrow, too. I ask that God protect my family, that he look after my friends, that he guide me in the way and the truth, and show me the path he wants me to take. I have an intimacy with the King of Kings and Lord of Lords that I haven’t felt since I was five years old.
When I was a child and prayed with my family, holding hands, I did it with the fear that if I didn’t I would burn in hell. I didn’t pray because I wanted to, or because I thought it was the right thing to do; I did it because burning in hell didn’t sound like a great way to spend my eternity. When I let go of hell, when I stopped believing in that horrible punishment, then praying became… peaceful. Not only does it feel peaceful, but it feels like it works. My life is better because I pray. And I keep praying because my life continues to get better. The stick didn’t work, and the carrot tastes that much more sweet because the stick was, finally, tossed away.
I could be wrong. That is something I think about, sure. But it is hard for me to believe that the God I feel beside me now, the God that I know is with me on a regular basis, could toss people into a lake of fire. Vengeance and rage are human weaknesses, rooted in fear and hatred; they’re not divine attributes. I believe in the God that gives us sunsets. I believe in the God that gifts us with smooth spring mornings, that let’s two people meet and fall in love, that allows a person to live a long and beautiful life. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.
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I’m a bit lost on this one. The title caught my attention, but you lost me not long after you said that the Bible isn’t true and that the disobedience of the world will go unpunished. I have a few questions for you and hopefully you can clarify a bit.
1. How do you decide what parts of the Bible are true?
2. What becomes of those in the world that reject the gift of salvation?
Those are both really good questions.
1.I tend to trust in the parts of the Bible that speak to me. I know that answer seems a bit white-washed, but it is how I’ve come to terms with it over the years.
2. I don’t know what happens to them. But I don’t believe that there is a hell they will burn in. I believe that God is above such small ideas as punishment and retribution. However, as I said in the piece, I could be wrong about that. Thanks for commenting.
Thank heavens you had the courage to put this into words. I have also had difficulty beleiving in a God who is supposed to be Love who will banish a majority proportion of His creation to Hellfire and Damnation. Makes no sense to me. I love my children, no matter what they do and how far they go ….. I wouldn’t be able to banish them if they didn’t do what I wanted. So why does God? I don’t know what happens to people, but I do wonder why it is God’s plan that I get to beleive and another doesn’t.
I don’t know what the answer is and I can only go forward in the light I am shown and I pray often that I am seeing a true light.
My understanding is that God does not banish people because He wants to. I always understood it as people who don’t want to be with God, who want to stay away from God, in effect banishing themselves. Using Gabriele’s analogy, it’s more like your children banishing you than you banishing your children… I do believe in God’s infinite mercy.
I agree with Cindy; it is ourselves and our free will that causes us to go to Hell. If we do not want to be with God, then He won’t force us to be with Him. He desires an open relationship with Him, not a guilt-filled one. This is what’s so beautiful to me about this article: the author’s transformation from what felt like a duty or job to a relationship with our God who is Love.
This website has plenty of resources about everything Catholic, but this link is specifically about Hell.
http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2006/11/hell-devil-eschatology-last-things.html
“I believe in the God that gives us sunsets. I believe in the God that gifts us with smooth spring mornings, that let‚Äôs two people meet and fall in love, that allows a person to live a long and beautiful life.”… I believe in that God too, which is easy considering where I live in the Pacific Northwest… But what if I lived in Burma or Somalia or any other war torn and ravaged place? Does God not exist for these people too? We love to make God in our own image and tame God to fit our understandings of who he is but God says “I Am”, regardless of how you think I should be “I Am”,that thought pushes me away from the desire to conform God to my image or understanding and pushes me to want to give Him room to be God a God who is not tame but very good. Even if his ways are beyond my understanding.
I would go even one step — maybe several steps — farther: religion and God have nothing to do with one another. Religion is important. Religion is essential. God is optional. At this point in my life — I turned 60 in April of 2009 — I have concluded that there really is such a thing as healthy religion. “Healthy religion” is not an oxymoron. But, in order to be healthy, religion has to center itself on people, and leave God on the side, assuming God is involved at all. (Marginalizing God is not the only thing a religion has to do in order to be healthy. But it has to start the getting-healthy process by de-emphasizing God.) The more religion centers itself on God, the more religion becomes just one more power trip, one more way for people to lord it over one another and to oppress one another. JC
Perhaps the truth goes one step further – that “god”, as a being, simply does not exist.
Speaking of hell, remember that the vast majority of people simply do not and cannot see a particular “god”, be it the Christian one or any other. So the idea that “hell” exists only for those who choose to reject a relationship with “god” is not true – it is not that people actually KNOW a god exists, and maliciously choose to ignore him/her, rather they are not even convinced of god’s existence. Why should a loving god be so hidden from the vast majority of people? He could show himself to everyone and people would still have the free will to follow or deviate from him/her.
Ask yourself, how sure can you be that what you have felt is actually the “presence” of some god? That what you have heard is actually some god speaking? How sure can you be of this “feeling” when all religious ideas, all manner of superstitions, are “supported” this way? By wrongly appealing to some subjective experience – experiences that we know can be easily misconstrued…
Perhaps the abundance of contradictory religious experiences cited as “evidence” of people’s, also, contradictory religious ideas shows us beyond a doubt of only one thing – that people’s experiences of some “god”, the feeling of his “presence”, are emphatically poor at revealing what is true in this world.
Atheists regard the faithful’s religious experiences in the same way that Christians view the religious experiences of people from every other faith – we are sure they do no prove the truth of any religious claim, or even the existence of god for that matter.
We just go one religion further.
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