A friend recently posted, “If you are someone who was raised in a Christian home but you have walked away from the beliefs you were raised in I would like to know what you believe now and why your beliefs changed.”
Here was my reply:
We both know firsthand what religious abuse looks like. While those experiences didn’t destroy my belief system, they started me on a journey of examining what I believed and why I believed it.
I ultimately concluded that Christianity is no different than any other religion. What was the difference between what we once believed, what evangelicals believed, what Pentecostals believed, what Catholics believe, what Mormons believe, what Muslims believe, or what any other religion believes. Nothing. They are all stories that people tell. And ultimately Christianity was a story told by a sect of people who claimed YHWH as their tribal diety, who wanted to elevate themselves to a special status by using their stories of supernatural as justification. Sound familiar? Those stories started with people thousands of years ago, by people just like you and I. And they got repeated again and again and took on mythical grandiosity. Just as many other stories in many other religions and sects.
In the end they’re all just that— stories. And I decided that the story that mattered to me was that which is based on what we as the human race have learned through the process of science. I don’t want to believe something just because someone somewhere said it or because I grew up in a certain culture. I want to believe it because it is based on provable fact. Truth that can be independently verified no matter where or when you’re from.
