I was born a Catholic, and spent the first 14 years of my life in a strict Catholic school. I was part of the Aspirancy; a "club" for girls who eventually wanted to enter the convent (but were too young at the time for actual postulancy.)
When my father sued for my custody, my mother packed us up in the middle of the night and fled Chicago. We spent the next four years on the run; I never really understood why, but she was terrified she would lose custody. We didn't go to church; my mother was too afraid of getting known in any one place. She didn't even allow me to go to school; we were never in one place long enough, and she didn't want me registered. (I later spent my 20s catching up on my education.) She eventually got me a fake ID and I worked as a dishwasher in several restaurants where she waitressed. But I read my Bible often.
When I was 20, I got married and within a year or two, decided to go to the "Catholic" church down the block. I didn't realize it wasn't Catholic, it was Episcopalian. By the end of the first service I realized my mistake, but the people were so nice and "Catholic-like" I decided to return the next week. I wound up spending the next 30 years in the Episcopal faith.
When I was thirty, I became a Sunday School teacher. My kids were all acolytes. Eventually, I was asked by my church to take over as Christian Education Director. I served in that capacity for several years, and my church gave me a terrific award for my service. They had never awarded a C-Ed director before, and I was thrilled that I was so well-loved.
After I turned 50, I started having qualms about my faith. The qualms started after I read the "Left Behind" series, which everyone touted as so wonderful but which disgusted me. I couldn't understand why people loved a series that "godified" riding around in hummers and coming to the little group with suitcase full of money. Not a single "good" person in that series was poor. Also, the way they vilified non-Christians bothered me. All non-Christians, except for a few Jews, were evil. That simply isn't true.
I started reading my Bible much more than ever before. For the first time, I read it cover to cover over the course of several nights without stopping. I had dreams each night that I was in the wrong religion. I had dreams of a jealous, petty god ordering his people, the Israelites, to slash babies' throats. I read more of the Bible, and the more I read, the more I realized that this was not the religion for me. Yet I feared to change. I kept begging God to forgive my doubts, because I was TERRIFIED of Hell. One night, I dreamt of a small child who was burned badly, and when a nun saw her burns, she said to the child, "Be thankful that you are such a good, God-fearing person, or that's what would happen to you forever after you die." When I woke up, I realized that the small child I saw in my dream was me. I was scalded badly as a child, and I even remembered the nun who had said it to me. That's when I knew that I had been brainwashed to fear God, and to fear THINKING. And that's when I stopped fearing my own thoughts, my own beliefs. And I knew I didn't believe in the Bible any more.
Yet through all of that, I could not give up on Jesus. I loved Jesus, and I would keep loving him no matter what. But I wondered how I could reconcile the God I loved with the God depicted in the Bible. I realized I couldn't, because no mainstream religion on Earth has the "right idea" concerning god. God is scattered in grains of truth throughout many, many religions of earth, both mainstream and non-traditional. All religions once drew from the same well of truth, but that well was polluted with so much poison, it is impossible to find an old religion that tells the whole truth now, or even most of it.
When early people saw that religion was polluted, they fell away. Early priests and writers, not God, created Hell and made up rigid rules to avoid it in order to coerce their followers back into belief. Fear is a powerful inducer. If people fell away, they would fail to pay their priests, who would be out of a job, and would lose both wealth and power. The priests couldn't have that, so they had to create fear.
God is not fear. God simply is, and if you choose to believe, if you call upon God and ask for blessings, you can be heard. If you live a good life, you will find the next life builds upon that goodness. If you live a bad life, the next life will build upon that evil. If you choose not to believe, God may not listen to you, but neither will God punish you for it. God is not violence, jealousy or pettiness. He or She does not need the belief of puny humans in order to be great, but priests SURE do! Fear gives them power, or at least it did, until this new generation came along, who are falling away in droves. Fear simply does not compel them as it did their parents.
So, that is why I am no longer a traditional Christian. But in my heart of hearts, I still believe that Jesus came to Earth to teach and help us. His early followers probably couldn't deprogram themselves from their early beliefs, and so they incorporated both old and new religions into one watered-down and mangled message. And they added all the fear that they were raised with. Perhaps there are more than just me who see this, and who return to Jesus' original message, not the Bible fear-mongering, violence and hate. Perhaps one day, religion will truly be borne of love and goodness, not prejudice, fear, exclusivity and an "I'm right and you're going to hell" mentality. JMHO
