I've been in touch with someone recently I was pretty close to when I was in the later years of my church involvement, I've got a couple of contacts that were, but I'm bouncing conversational emails back and forth with her and it feels more active than the others. I've been thinking about me and my old faith a lot recently, I'm not going back to it, but the whole thing is making me wholly uncomfortable. It's a mixture of many things, how Easter has just been and gone and people are going on about it, how there is a big, obnoxious cross on a tower just across the road from my bedroom window, how my memory keeps recalling some of the more atrocious crap I've had to put up with while being at the church. Whatever it is, it's reached a critical mass in my head, and I've decided it's time to let it out.
I'm not completely anti-religion, or anti-faith. I've seen lives actually get ludicrously better because of finding a god, (I'm thinking of people who have gone from being wrecked drug addicts to pillars of the community,) and give people a reason to keep going and making a difference in the world. I feel like it is a bit like a crutch, or training wheels, to give people what they need in order to be as strong as they are. I think some people are inherently strong, and that religion or faith gives them the reason, and direction, to unhook themselves from the grip of things holding them back and display their entire strength of character.
That said, the authority hating part of me finds the Church and its organisation inherently repulsive. I don't even have to go as far as finding out about paedophilic priests to get to that point. My revulsion is a lot more personal to me, and the things that the organisation has inflicted on me.
So that makes me atheist, or sometimes agnostic, or whatever, last thing I want is another label to add to my ever increasingly list of them that someone somewhere is likely to get all judgemental about. On judgementalism, it is fairly bloody irritating to see people be judgemental against something for being judgemental. Is it me or is that the most blinding case of hypocrisy ever? For me, I don't get to be judgemental about anything, I'm sick of being the object of judgementalism, and if I want to see the end of judgemental attitudes, I can't exactly be the one sitting there with a list of them as long as the worst of judgemental types.
I remember a nice little catchphrase that came up, in a time where catchphrases seemed to be cropping up all the time (which made me feel varying degrees of sick,) was to hate the sin and love the sinner. IE. What you're doing is wrong, but I still value you as a human being. I don't believe the church organisation really does that so well at all. On the list of things I'm likely to do, walking into a church while it is being used for Christian stuff is fairly down towards the end. While most people are actually cool, it is likely to be a hotspot of judgementalism and outright hatred, in a similar sort of way to wandering outside at certain times and places is sure-fire way to get the stuffing kicked out of you.
So really, apart from the holier-than-thou judgemental attitudes that seem to breed in the petri-dish of religion (and religion is certainly not the only place this happens, I'm aware), I don't really have that much of a problem with it. I don't believe, which is as much a thing of being sceptical of most things, people, and authorities, than having specific proof of its non-truthfulness. That most religions don't do a good job of proving themselves true doesn't help their cases (God being unwilling to do party tricks to go 'hello I'm here', because God wants faith, and faith based on proof isn't good enough). I'm specifically not getting into the exact reasoning why I don't believe simply because I don't want to have the “you're wrong about this” conversation with someone online.
I wanted to let out a little of some of the things I've experienced of people within the church too. In fairness, this makes them 'bad' people who happen to be Christians. I was respected by, and got treated better by, other Christians. So I don't see all Christians as a group of people who are nasty and evil. Just that a couple of people who I have met, were complete bastards. These people are ones who I just really really hope I'll never bump into, ever again. I'm not going to now though. My point now is that bad people don't prove a religion bad/wrong.
Of course, I've written all this without actually going into my actual church history.
I was taken to a lot of youth based things for a while between 8 and 12, refused to go between then and 14, at which point I got an invite to the 14-18's bible study group. I was at that and did an alpha course during it, among other things. The bible study group regularly took over a service once a month, and over the course of my time with them I led services and rose to actually delivering a sermon. After I turned 18 I stayed with the group, but eventually left because I wanted to move up to more grown up roles.
At 20 I was put forth for a gap year training program, which my church paid for. The programme involved one day a week of bible study/topical training, and the rest of the week working for a couple of church projects, and having a part time job at the same time. One project was called KidzKlub, (weekly evangelisic saturday-morning-television-esqe club, something I now find morally questionable at best,) which was just being set up at the time, by the church I called my home church. I think it was their hope that I would stay with the children's outreach, because when I wanted once again, to move onto more grown up orientated roles, I found myself without much support. During this time I read through and made my own annotations on the Bible in its canon entirety.
From 21 to 23 I ran two bible study groups. One, my housemate at the time and myself ran between us, and the other was held by the main church for under 35's. The main church eventually asked us to stop running our home group, so we stopped, and I continued to help run the second group. After a while, the groups leadership distilled to three of us, and at that point it became very much my own group to do with as I liked. At the time I had stopped going to the main church, because quite frankly, it was dull, fake, and more about spectacle than actual biblical teaching and support, which was what had led me and my old housemate to start our group in the first place, and what I wanted, after having had it for a year with my gap year programme and no longer having it.
I spent a lot of time in that period with very mixed feelings. I was a cynical believer, distrusting and very bitter at a few things, as my home church got progressively worse, and people I had liked and had support from had begun to leave and had left me behind. In some ways, my distrust for authority began to grow here.
At 23, the main church asked me to leave because I wasn't going on the Sunday mornings. Instead of yielding and going back to a service that was superficial I decided I would leave. The group I was leading fell apart, and I was no longer involved in any kind of church activity. About three months after that I lost pretty much my faith, focus, and determination and another three after that I became depressed. Things that I had minor troubles with became much harder to deal with, and things I was trying to ignore and control stopped being things I needed to ignore or control. The depression, in regards to all this, feels like the thing that hit me once I was left with no support network. I think, to a large extent, what it did for me is give me people to be there for me, which was a huge factor in keeping myself 'sane'.
While I am told that Christianity is not exclusive of people such as myself, I don't feel the need to go back to it. I don't feel it relevant to my life, and definitely don't want the pressure and life that came with it. It's a part of my past that has hurt me a lot. The suggestion I go back to it is like putting a knife in my hand and telling me to stab myself in the gut; it's not going to happen. The topic still makes me cringe and uncomfortable when it comes up. One of the reasons I changed my name entirely, fore-, sur-, and middle name, was because of the things I did with the church; I no longer wanted the name so associated with those deeds.
So yeah, it's an entirely dead and buried aspect of me that may get raised and sent to heaven, if such a thing could happen, but it's not something I believe or hope for, or seek refuge in.
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