I was watching a video today which was made by somebody who was “coming out” by making that exact video. I wasn’t quite so brave as to “come out” as an apostate on YouTube; I did it on Facebook instead.
Now, it probably would have been a bit better decision to pick another day to do it besides Easter Sunday, but I’ve always been more than a little bit impulsive, and I rarely plan to do something big and important and then wait until the planned time to do it. So I was emotional on what had been my absolute favorite holiday and “came out.” This is screenshots of the actual Facebook that I posted on Easter of 2017, followed by my commentary looking back.
I want to add before I continue that I’m using the phrase “come out” because I’ve heard other ex-Christians use it that way. I do not mean in any way to minimize what people go through when they literally come out as LGBTQ+. I think that both are a big deal, but it would be very much against my values to pretend that I actually understand subjectively the level of discrimination that LGBTQ+ people face every single day. What I mean by “coming out” is that I was presenting information about myself that caused most people in my life to see me very differently, and in that way, it is similar to an actual coming out story.
At this point, I had not yet come to be ecstatic at having escaped Christianity. It was all I had ever lived for, and losing it came with a profound sense of loss. At the time, I still had parts of me that felt like “if only” I had found the “right” or “True” Christianity, I might have been able to stay, or “if only” I hadn’t been traumatized and become mentally ill, I might have been able to stay. At the time I believed, as many of my friends still believe, that my apostasy was the result of my mental illness. Even in the same moment that I was presenting what seems to me now as an iron-clad argument for my own decision to become an apostate, I still felt like my leaving meant that there was something wrong with me. I presented the news that I had found my true self as though I were announcing a cancer diagnosis. Now, I see my apostasy as inevitable no matter what the circumstances of my life had been, and my skeptic gene now feels like one of my favorite things about myself.
Note that at no point did I feel that leaving Christianity would leave me without morals. At some point I plan to write an entry on my new views on morality and ethics after a lifetime of defending the idea of moral absolutes, but for now, suffice it to say that all leaving Christianity did was allow me to embrace morals that felt right to me, rather than whatever was dictated to me from a religion riddled with everything from genocide to constant sex scandals.
I just took a bunch of screenshots so don’t mind the overlapping photos here.
1) “There is still time” definitely includes the strong conviction that I was “giving up” on something that would have been an important endeavor. Christians definitely were not celebrating my liberation upon receiving the news of my apostasy. On the other hand, I really do appreciate that, given that they believed that I was going to go to hell, they were worried. As annoying as desperate pleas for me not to allow my immortal soul to be damned may be, I honestly appreciate the sentiment behind them.
2) I’m still thankful to the people who piped up in my defense and offered encouragement. I had pushed them all to my periphery when they came out as apostates, but they came out of the woodwork for me when I came out myself.
- We ARE forced to love him if we’re going to go to hell for all eternity for rejecting him
- If God wants us to all choose him, and we all would if we were in hell and found out that it was real and it sucked, then why would God make hell be eternal with no way out? Why not let us change our minds? Christians usually reply with the following verse:
“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’
“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’
“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
” ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ “
Luke 16:19-31, NIV, qtd. in https://biblia.com/books/niv2011/Lk16.19-31
Okay, a couple things here. First of all, this verse is usually the one mostly likely to be picked when Christians are making the argument that:
IF someone has the bible
AND still does not accept Jesus as their lord and savior
THEN nothing else would have ever persuaded them
THEREFORE people in hell would still choose hell over heaven even though they’re burning in eternal torment
THEREFORE there’s no point in God giving them a way out because they would never accept it
I’m going to completely ignore whether or not that’s actually what the original author of this text believed, since I really don’t agree that the bible is god-breathed/inspired/infallible/etc. so I don’t care about original intent, only what Christians take away. I’m also going to ignore the fact that many people who are dead never had “Moses and the Prophets” or anything else from the bible; and even if they did, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of them rejected the bible out of intellectual honesty to themselves and not because they secretly knew it was true and wanted to sin or whatever BS. (When I first became an apostate, I myself was not certain that Christianity was not true, but now I wholeheartedly believe that its claims are ridiculous and I would have ultimately deconverted anyway, even if not out of protest.)
The point I do want to make to respond to this verse is that its claim is false. If I were in hell, I would be awfully surprised to find myself there. If a way out were given to me and only me, I like to think that I would be like John McCain and refuse release from being a POW until all the other prisoners were also released (Relman, 2018). However, knowing myself and my ability to resist my own id, I seriously doubt that I would suddenly be so resolute while falling into a bottomless pit while engulfed in eternal fire, or whatever the absence of God is supposed to be like. Also note that McCain did come home when the other prisoners got to come with him; you definitely did not see the entire POW camp wanting to stay behind when there was a way to get all of them out. So, my point is, the belief that nobody would want to leave hell and that’s why its eternal is nuts. If we would never change our minds in hell, how much less likely would we be to change our minds in this life? So why bother evangelizing at all?
Christians say that God can’t help it that eternity away from him is so torturous, and he would totally alleviate our suffering if he could. Aside from the confusion I feel about why God apparently ties his own hands and can’t do things that would make everything easier for everybody, I have long thought that this sounded like something an abuser would say in a coercive relationship: basically, “You have to love me or I can’t do anything to help the pain I’m forced to afflict on you—it was your choice.” I recently found out that others have also made this connection, such as in this video:
This channel goes a step farther in this video:
Going back to my list (remember way back up there?):
3) This all really seems like a blame-the-victim thing. Poor ol’ God keeps getting rejected by the bad, terrible humans when he really wanted to save us from damnation but wouldn’t let him. And it would be no fun for him if he took away our freewill, so he’s just gotta let us burn so he can get the most out of his totally non-coercive relationships with those who choose him.
4) The constant references in the bible to all the people groups that will have people saved out of them is supposed to make it better, but it comes off to me a bit like equal-opportunity-most-people-are-damned.
1) As you can see from my comment in the screenshot, I often get ahead of myself and think that I’m doing a lot better that I really am, and won’t end up in the psych hospital again. So, yeah, it is possible to be apart from the Christian god and also in torment. I still would make the argument that separating myself from that god has made me happier than I would have been if I had remained religious, and for so many reasons. For example, it has allowed for intellectual honesty, it has helped me deal with my shame, and I don’t have to feel like everyone around me is going to hell.
2) “P” had absolutely no idea how much reading I had done, and all of it was literature made by Christians except for non-Christian passages that were assigned to me in literature classes at my Evangelical college. It was insulting that she assumed I had no idea where to find information in favor of Christianity. It’s just another example of Christians who assume that people who leave just haven’t learned “the facts.” On the other hand, I now feel a bit proud that she thought I must have come up with these ideas by reading atheistic authors (when I hadn’t even thought of myself an atheist yet at that point), as thought the ideas would be good enough to produce a bestseller book. 🙄
3) There’s really no point in going into all the scandals with Ravi Zacharias…
4) Mostly everyone’s default is to believe what the people around them believed in their formative years. Add in that I was homeschooled and knew zero atheists until well after college, and, well, it might be a bit silly to assume that my “default” was “unbelief.”
1) “F” presents another example of, “It’s harder to be a Christian than not a Christian” so obviously I left because I couldn’t hack it. It’s really tough living as a member of the most privileged group in the country. “The Enemy” is always at work. (Or else religion is toxic and that’s why it damages people so much that the damage actually outweighs all their legal and social advantages…)
2) Regarding my comment in the screenshot: I tried to schedule meetings with my pastor, anyway, but it was hard to find times when all three of us were free (me, him, and his wife) since obviously it would be a major impropriety for a male to be alone in a room with a potential harlot.
3) “P’s” heart would not have hurt for me if she had known how good it was for me to become an apostate, but again, it was pity meant in kindness.
4) I love when people identify themselves as “very intellectual people.”
1) Re P: I have to admit, I have not continued to seek something not worth seeking.
2) There go those “facts” again…
3) Re S: I don’t deserve hell.
1) S: “I’m damaged goods and I’m so lucky that I’ve been forgiven for being born evil”–see above video entitled “Abuser.”
2) “God is more powerful than us, so everything he does is good”=”Might makes right.”
3) More self-shaming, “I must not be patient at all because I have to believe that I’m bad.”
4) S: “We’re lucky that ANYTHING good exists because we are THAT BAD!”
5) Then another friend gets on and we get a vote for apostasy 😃
The woman who enters here has always been so sweet to me 🙂 I don’t find Christianity to exactly offer “unconditional love,” but a theme I’ve noticed is that people who are dedicated to believing the bible no matter what often derive from it whatever was already in their character. People who love unconditionally either become apostates OR find unconditional love in the bible somewhere.
“C” acknowledges that I might or might not return to the Christian Faith, and both possibilities are okay. This is whole lot more likely to result in my returning to Christianity than the “convert or else” rhetoric that we mostly see here.
1) Wait, “J” wouldn’t love others if she weren’t a Christian? I don’t think that’s true. I think that she would have continued to love others because that was part of her personality. Meanwhile, Christian ministries such as food pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, etc., are pretty obviously a form of love that has serious strings attached. From my vantage point now, it feels a lot like they prey on the most vulnerable members of society and “love” people who are the easiest to convert. People feel guilty taking without giving something back, so people who are desperate to “take” food, will feel inevitable pressure to “give” their soul in return. (For more on reciprocity and human evolution see Haidt, 2006.) Love with the intention to convert is not love for the sake of love.
2) J: “It’s just that God is too good for us.”
3) Okay, in order to make my next point, I need my reader to consider this passage:
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
“At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.
“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’
“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Matthew 18:21-35, NIV, qtd. in https://biblia.com/bible/niv2011/Mt18.21-35
This passage, like basically everything else in Christianity, assumes that we have this horribly evil nature and owe the god of all creation an unpayable debt, which obviously I have serious disagreements with. Then, it goes on to say that we, like God, should cancel each other’s debt.
In the next breath, most Christians will tell you that God couldn’t just simply forgive us without sacrificing his son, because he had to get his wrath out somehow (he could not tolerate injustice). Note that when people quote this passage, I have never heard anyone say that I should redirect my anger at somebody else in order to forgive. Humans are expected to be able to just forgive, whereas God gets to vent his feelings all over the place. As usual, humans are held to a higher moral standard than God.
4) There are a lot of bodies from 2,000 years ago that haven’t been found, actually. It’s kind of how decomposition works. And if they did find a body, does somebody have Jesus’ DNA to compare it to? Can somebody sneak into a Catholic eucharist to get a blood sample?
1) Another awesome friend (“R”) chimes in and for any other Heathens out there, if you ever want to have a Heathen meetup while the Christians are in church on Easter Sunday, HMU!
2) As for “M,” I really appreciated that other people in the USA also had issues with Christianity right after the 2016 election. Honestly, though, Christianity started being tied to xenophobic people way before that. Like, pretty much as soon as it was a fully-fledged religion it started doing what most organized religions do.
3) Some people believe that the horrible things that are listed here are associated with a misdirected Christianity, and “M” finds good things in the bible and says that the problem is not the god of the bible, but rather with the people who follow the bible. If you look at some of my other recent posts, though such as here, I would argue that the bible has some pretty horrible things in it all by itself. The followers got the idea somewhere.
1) Re SM: Some people aren’t Christians, and some people don’t “have any peace or reassurance of a hereafter.” Allow me to offer an extremely simplified clarification:
| Christians | Not Christians | |
| Have peace | People exist here | People exist here |
| Don’t have peace | People exist here | People exist here |
There are people who are Christians who are miserable, and there are people who are not Christians who are happy. Here is an example that I have already mentioned on this blog:
Additionally, as many have noted, people don’t choose what we’re going to believe. It’s impossible to just choose to believe something that brings peace or reassurance by offering an afterlife or whatever.
2) I personally don’t find it convincing to see prophecies fulfilled with stories that are not verifiable. And I know the Christians are going to be all over that, but no, we can’t place 100% trust in the bible for the same reason we can’t place 100% trust in any other “historical document” or, for that matter, any other document or source at all. Which leads me to my next point:
3) I hate that I have to even say this, but just because parts of the bible are backed up up by archeology or other documents, does not mean EVERYthing in the bible actually happened.
4) I actually had purchased The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict: Evidence I & II Fully Updated in One Volume To Answer The Questions Challenging Christians in the 21st Century by Josh McDowell back when I was trying to prove to myself that Christianity was true. As it was enormous, I did not read the entire thing, and I would be surprised if “SM” had read the entire thing, either. What I do know is that very long one-sided books have been written to back up lots of points of view; Christianity is not unique in that. Also, people thought of things off the tops of their heads to debunk Christianity and when I tried to look up the official rebuttal in the enormous book, it didn’t even mention the argument that I was hoping to rebut. It was surprising to me that there were such obvious objections that were completely left out.
5) SM literally says, “My daughter, an atheist, struggles constantly with fighting depression even though she knows the truth.” THIS is an enormous issue which continues for most of the rest of the thread: Christians often believe that when someone both is not a Christian and also has mental illness, the lack of Christianity is the cause of the mental illness OR, even more commonly, they believe that the mental illness is the cause of the lack of Christianity. Note that this does not have any explanation for Christians who have mental illness. Nor does it consider it possible that our actual mental illness diagnoses were produced by trauma, as it’s pretty obvious from context that SM’s daughter’s might be.
6) Then “R” comes back with extremely justified anger, which I appreciate, since it makes it so I don’t have to go off now.
1) Re N: “Every religion is right” was a belief that my paternal grandparents, who were born in the 1920s, did hold. I have not met anyone in this generation who actually holds to that. I deeply admire my grandparents, who found things that they liked in each religion and each synthesized something that worked and made sense and intellectual honesty for them individually. They certainly rejected full-blown versions of any religion, as when I was an Evangelical, they definitely did not think that that was the full expression of truth. Obviously, most religions are incompatible with each other, and if “N” had taken the time to really get to know people of that generation, he would have seen that their beliefs were not as simplistic as you think. However, given that most people nowadays have indeed moved on, I think it’s strange that he thought it was such a common belief currently. Almost like he’s really not listening to anyone outside of his bubble.
2) It is far more than a slight to accuse your daughter of choosing depression, and asking SM to stop directly harming her daughter warranted anger.
3) I really like “R.”
1) Re N: I’ve been in all kinds of circles, including Christian, and the Christians were definitely holding on to the “snap out of it mentality” unusually hard.
2) Although I have anguish in a lot of arenas of my life, I find it telling that I found (and held on to) spiritual peace by becoming an apostate.
3) Re R: I didn’t realize how destructive Christianity was yet at the time that I first “came out,” but I knew enough to agree with her, even then.
1) Re N: I do not see how saying that Christianity can in many cases exacerbate or even cause mental illness, is at all the same as saying that people choose mental illness. People do not choose what they believe. People can’t just “decide to drop” any beliefs.
2) I personally have one and only one diagnosis, which is severe C-PTSD/Developmental Trauma, but I believe “N” that depression can probably be caused by genes (I’m not a neuroscientist), and I don’t mean to invalidate anyone’s experience if they have a mental illness with a genetic cause.
3) Re SM: WTF now it’s pretty obvious that this poor daughter has trauma from her insane mother. How could anybody deal with that coming from their mom and make it out unscathed?
4) Hot tip for anyone curious: if you say you love someone unconditionally, “despite” XYZ, you probably are not as supportive as you think you are.
5) Another hot tip for anyone still reading: anecdotal evidence that you did or did not like something does not equate to evidence that everyone will or will not like that same thing. My mom wouldn’t let my lonely, homeschooled younger self join the Girl Scouts because she had done it as a kid and didn’t like it. We weren’t allowed to eat seafood because she didn’t like it. Assuming that others will always have the same preferences as you is a boundaries issue. You don’t know where you end and the other person begins.
1) For what it’s worth, I still think that there’s evidence that religion can make people happier, but I am increasingly thinking that that has less to do with the religion and more to do with the socialization and being around a “tribe” of people who you feel you have something important in common with. It is my hope that society will eventually invent something more effective than houses of worship and organized religion will become obselete.
2) And then we get “N” trying to say that if I had been raised in a faith built not on “cruelty and selfishness” then I wouldn’t have been too damaged to be a Christian. If I’d been raised in a nicer church, the main difference is that they wouldn’t have been so 🤬-y to me when I became an apostate.
Now we get “W” (at the top, cut off) and his wife “MJ” who apparently is too submissive a wife to have her own Facebook account. They start out by saying how good it is to hear from me, as though I wasn’t posting on Facebook ten times a day at that point and they could have just as easily responded to any other post. Do I need to address the rest? I actually think I’m just going to leave it here because any readers will know anyway that I’m too spiritually blind to understand the profundity of “W’s” and “MJ’s” writings.
1) I would argue that to say that believing that a being is the actual definition of Absolute Good and also commands genocide and also gives us the Golden Rule is a bit more contradictory than different opinions on how to describe a pineapple. And yes, God would be more complex than a pineapple, but what exactly would be a contradiction that this person would see as being too much? Absolutely nothing would ever dissuade her from her faith. So if she’s going to say that God is too complex for us to approach intellectually at all, then why even bother trying to rationalize? And it would be awfully nice of this god to come up with another way for people to be saved other than believing ridiculous claims that many rational people will be unable to believe. After all, how are we supposed to learn about our world if not with reason/logic, the five senses, the scientific method, etc.? Yes, emotion and intuition can get people to land on Christianity but it isn’t reliable at all at doing that and if I just had to stand back and look at it, I would say that people were simply flocking to the religions that threatened the worst punishments in the afterlife for not believing. Oh, wait…
While on the subject of ridiculous claims, feel free to check out this video which influenced the way I wrote the last paragraph:
2) God apparently isn’t afraid of rejection, but he was willing to give us freewill with inadequate information to match because his favorite thing ever is glory and it’s worth a few billion people going to hell if the remainder randomly end up choosing him thanks to either predestination or blind luck. (Calvinists taught me that it was definitely the predestination thing, but that that did not negate our own personal responsibility because we did have freewill; he was just also really good at guessing and predicted with perfect accuracy that we would always “choose” evil every single time. After that, it gets a bit nuts. See my posts on Reassurance and Existential Musings or A Child Sacrificed for more on that. Calvinism isn’t the prevailing opinion anymore, so that’s probably not what the commentator in the above screenshot thought, anyway.)
3) I would like to know how much these guys think one is actually supposed to examine an idea before moving on. Like, given that I had spent almost a quarter century on Christianity alone, if it’s so important to examine every idea so carefully, it would have probably been time for me to move on to another one anyway because if I was even planning to be get through the top 5 explanations for the Universe in one human lifespan, I was already running behind…
1) Once again, we get a Christian who thinks that for some wild reason, it would be not “ok” with me to be prayed for 🙄
2) A response containing anything other than arguing or trying to change my mind was apparently not a consideration for “LA.” Like maybe a “Congratulations, you’ve taken a huge step to being true to yourself!”?
In closing, there are a few more things that I want to note. First, somehow not all the comments were still there. I distinctly remember one person who was not in any of the comments above who told me, regarding my having left the Christian god, that “No matter how much you run from Him, He still loves you.” This bothered me because it was the first time that I distinctly understood that God’s love was presented as a threat. God would always love me, so I would always have an infinite debt to him. It’s the same sort of subtle difference between when people offer to pray out of kindness, versus when that prayer is an insult (“God only listens to people like me, so I’ll condescend to praying for you.”) Not that people who are my friends now definitely only pray for me out of kindness.
Secondly, if one believes that they have to love a being or else be damned, it is impossible to freely love that being, or at least to be sure that they loved freely. Comments kept referencing that God wants us to love him “not because we have to,” so he gave us freewill. But there is no way that anybody could actually know for a fact that they would still love God without the threat of hell, unless the threat of hell were removed.
My father and siblings honestly believe that I’m just not intellectual enough to be an Evangelical, 1689 Christian. I believe that intellectual people can believe all kinds of things. And almost all the commenters were kind people, many of whom I still consider to be close friends. Although I see a lot of problems with religion, I don’t think that Christianity makes one a bad parent, person, intellectual, or bad at anything. I do think that for most Christians, if they left Christianity, they would be better at those things. I genuinely believe that even though they are often doing well for themselves as they are, many aspects of their lives would actually improve if they were an apostates, just as I believe that they believe that I would improve if I became a Christian.
And with that, it’s late and I’m tired. I know a blog post is less attention-grabbing than a YouTube video, but to any other apostates out there who can relate to my story, I hope you can feel a sense of camaraderie and know that you are not alone, even if you face a lot of opposition. And much as Christians often disagree (Matthew 12:30, Luke 11:23), you don’t have to actually hate Jesus to not agree with them. But you can if you want to.
References
Biblia.com. (2011). New International Version Bible [Digital]. Retrieved from https://biblia.com/books/niv2011/
DarkMatter2525. (2017, July 24). Abuser [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/Hm4GtxOOqeI
DarkMatter2525. (2016, February 11). …but intelligent people believe in God [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/Y201QzDdzbg
DarkMatter2525. (2014, March 10). “You Send Yourself To Hell” [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/HaJgLBoB_Pw
Genetically Modified Skeptic. (2021, July 23). “It’s impossible for atheists to do this!” …but It’s Not [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/JgN4nOp-WvE
Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. London, England: Basic Books.
Relman, E. (2018, August 26). As a POW in Vietnam, John McCain refused release until his fellow prisoners were freed, making him a hero in the eyes of many. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-refused-early-release-as-a-pow-in-vietnam-2018-8
