My Story

[Kyle Knight]

Hello to all. I hope this is the right forum for this.

I am a 42 year old male who is, to put it mildly, VERY CYNICAL. Until recently. When I was a child, I attended Sunday school every week. This was around the age of 10 or 11. Then, I drifted away from the church, never to return. In the years following, I grew very cynical and sour toward religion as a whole. I saw all the scandals and it had an enormous inpact on my belief. I saw all the hypocrites and felt good about being, in my mind, proven right.

People would try to get me to go to church, and I would ridicule them big-time. My answer was always "I don't have to get dressed up and get up early Sunday morning to hang around hypocrites". I would see a very religious person and set my sights on destroying their belief.

This went on unabated for years. Then, when I was 33, I got married. Now, my wifes father was a Baptist preacher. I never met him, he passed away about a week after I met my wife. He had a huge influence on all of his children. They all respected him deeply for his faith. Meanwhile, I'm still my old bitter self.

My wife has asked me on several occasions to go to church with her. I never went, and still haven't.

That may soon change. For the last few monthes, I have been reading alot. I read "The Book Of Enoch" and loved it. That book got the ball rolling for me to change my mind. I thought alot about the whole religious thing, and had to ask myself some hard questions. After much thought, I came to the following conclusion: That I did indeed believe in God, and wanted so much for all the Bible says to be true. What side-tracked me for so long was the way I would view human behavior. I would see all the wrong in the world, all the violence and murder, and seeing people starve, and all the other horrible stories we see nightly on the news, and think, religion does no good. If it did, the world would be a better place.

I should have been thinking about how much worse it would be without religion.

Now, please don't think I'm attacking here, for it is not in intention, but alot of my anger is because of Baptists. Now, I am not lumping all Baptists together here. I just feel that I don't see quite eye to eye with that particular belief system. The church that I attended as a child was Methodist, and thats where I will return. I don't live in the same city as when I was child, but I have been thinking about going to the Methodist church here. My wife is Baptist, but I think she will go along with me just to get me in church.

 

[Zindagee Rahmaan]

wow...

Lovely story. Nice to see you dear..um..respected fellow

my wifes father was a Baptist preacher.

uh...wasn't he your father in law? anyways better is to keep him for wife only... so sorry!

My answer was always "I don't have to get dressed up and get up early Sunday morning to hang around hypocrites".

Is that really true about sunday schools? Oo no' good!

But I like your this thought:

What side-tracked me for so long was the way I would view human behavior. I would see all the wrong in the world, all the violence and murder, and seeing people starve, and all the other horrible stories we see nightly on the news, and think, religion does no good. If it did, the world would be a better place.

Why not to think about followers do not good with religion? I don't think religion should be blamed after follower's deeds...h'm?

Nice to read your story, Welcome ! I'm not the beptist either so any other could help you here. Best wihses

 

[Breathe]

Hi and welcome here, it's nice to hear from you

I can understand why you are bitter because of a particular group, although I hope that your bitterness will be healed soon. Since I'm only 21 (almost 22! ), I can't really give you much advice, but I encourage you to let go of the bitterness and resentment. I've been in a similar situation myself, I hated religion and the very existence of it and I always tried to destroy people's faith.

I'm glad you have been doing some reading, and it's good that you have come to finding God. That's a great step in the right direction! Be sure to check out different things, religion is like being in an ice-cream shop, hundreds of different flavours! I can understand why you don't see eye-to-eye with baptism, to me it's a nice denomination of Christianity, but it's not for me - I prefer slightly liberal, but still 'average' Christianity.

I can understand why hearing of all the evil in the world can side-track you, but that's unfortunately the way of humans. People can be selfish and horrible, but I truly believe that most people want to be good deep down. Media have a way of hyping everything up, and when you walk down the street, you know it'd be rare to actually have something happen to you - I say that as someone is a nocticable "easy target".

Religion can make people do bad things, but religion can also make people do good things - the personal change that peopel go through when they have found faith is something that is truly beautiful, and I think that if people actually acted more in-line with their faith, the world would be a lot better off.

Anyway, keep in touch. If I've offended you, I didn't mean to - I'm just not very good with words.

 

[Kyle Knight]

No offense at all!

 

[ladyace]

Wow that is true i felt the smae way but toward catholic and im southeren baptist which is different from regular baptist good story

 

[Dezzie]

I had that same problem against Mormons. I used to go to a Mormon church and I could just see the hypocrites all around me. Ladyace has had the same problems with Catholics and Kyle Knight, you had them with Baptists... It really makes you wonder who the real hypocrites are.

 

[Autodidact]

I look at it differently. I don't look at the behavior of the people who believe something, I look at the evidence and try to figure out whether it's true. I started with "Is there a God?" It seemed to me there was insufficient evidence to conclude there was, so stopped there. It wouldn't matter if all the people who believed there was were lovely, it woudn't make that statement any more true.

Once you get into specific religions, they're all so silly, and have no reliable evidence in their support, and really devolve into nonesense as soon as you analyse them logically, so that's that. I mean, Mennonites are really nice people, but it doesn't follow that the Creator of the Universe only cares about the functional equivalent of a mold scum on the skin of a particle of a particle of a particle in a vast empty universe, and apparently only about the ones who happened to live in Palestine 2000 years ago, so He turned himself into a baby individual member of that species so they could kill Him and that would somehow give them eternal life, etc. etc. and now it's really important that their descendants get together once a week to talk and sing about that. It's just a silly, self-centered, human-centric story. It doesn't even make sense.

 

[Buttons*]

It's good to hear that. I also went through something similar. I was raised Episcopalian, and while that was all well and good, my parent's eventually divorced when I was 12, and we had to move to the country. I started attending a non-denominational Christian Church, and they ruined me. They were the biggest bunch of hypocrites I'd ever laid my eyes on. Unfortuantely, I had to deal with it every day, not just one day a week, because I had made the choice to transfer to the adjoining High School so I could do baton twirling for the band. (The public school wouldn't let me.)

So, I had to deal with three years of hypocrisy before I found the Gnostic Gospels. They changed my life. I was able to see things more clear, and even accept the hypocrites for who they were. It took me a long time to recover from the pain that non-denom Christianity had put on my heart, which is why I joined this forum so many years ago. I am at a point where I am not mad at Christianity anymore - and hopefully one day you will be able to say the same.

*hugs*

Thank you for sharing your story. I hope you learn a lot here. (BTW, Enoch is really great )

 

[raybo]

Kyle Knight,

You are right to return to your church of birthrite, and it is only a beginning as you say. Remember, division is rooted in the perceiver. If you do not see any division, or if it is cast down or diminished... one becomes free to accept so much more in all of this.

Let me add that there is not one Church, Temple, Synagogue, or Mosque that this one does not fell blessed to share in. From Christian roots this surprises many.

Here's something for you to realize then consider. Such hypocrisy has been witnessed in every religion. It has been the discussion of much debate, and very much so in the early church; and for those who followed the way... soon after Yeshua's death.

Good or Godliness displaces evil and deception. Yet, at the same time it attracts (evil) but that evil must wait in the periphery and cannot approach while good is being played out. When revivals are seen from generation to generation what soon follows is the type of hypocrisy you speak. Slowly but surely the deception enters by those who are attracted to the faith but do not hold to the same blameless truth.

Here's something you will find right of the wall. (rotw) If you consider the president Barack Obama. He came out of the Chicago area. If he was in any measure doing good work and the work of the creator... when he left... there was opportunity for deception (evil)to weave it's way in. Now look at the news reports about the shootings in the schools in the Chicago area.

This stuff i caution you to consider. For those who see such things, usually have overcome the likes of fear, that others would get all worked up over when they hear this stuff.

Your seeking has just begun... it was better for you to be as you were before, than for you to be modest in your search. Be diligent and your convictions will guide you. Remember! One is never alone in any of this.

Blessings!