For around 60 years of my life I was a genuine "born-again" Christian. The following is the story of not only how but also why I became an ex-Christian. This doesn't mean that I don't believe in God, it means I no longer believe Christianity is true. This is the reason that I can no longer consider myself a Christian.
Many people think that anyone who declares themselves to be no longer a Christian, that they were never one in the first place. This couldn't be further from the truth. For any and every definition of Christian that people have, I can sincerely say that I was a Christian in the truest sense of the word. Exactly what I am at the moment, I haven't exactly figured out yet. But I surely know what I am not -- and that is a Christian.
Being brought up in a Christian family, I went to church nearly every Sunday. As a very sensitive child around 7 or 8, I got extremely frightened of the pastor's sermons of hell file and brimstone.My nightmares were of falling endlessly in a bottomless pit engulfed in flames, which caused me to frequently have difficulty sleeping. I can personally testify to the fact that one of the cruelest and most evil things you can do to a child is to instill in him the fear of Hell!
For me, going up to the front of the church at alter call was what I had to do to avoid going to Hell, according to what I could understand from sermons. Being a shy child going up to the front was difficult for me. One night there was a long line of people going up there so I thought it would be easy just getting in line with everybody else. When I got to the front the preacher asked me something and I agreed. That was a relief -- I wasn't going to Hell. To my mind as a child, around that time was the first time Jesus came into my life.
As time went on, I got to know the bible stories about the man who went around doing good. I really liked that and I liked him. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I talked to him a lot and began to have a close relationship with him.
But I had a hard time knowing just who to address my prayers to. What kind of solved that for me was the story in the bible about Jesus' baptism. In this story, God was up in the sky speaking, and Jesus was down in the river at the same time. That solved it for me. It was God who I would direct my prayers to and Jesus was his son who God sent. So I just prayed to God.
Growing up I still had to go to church, but really didn't like it. It just all seemed so phoney to me and I would frequently try to get out of going. After my parents split up in my teen years I rarely went to church. When I got into college that's when I was introduced to evolution and the bible began to be a fairy tale to me.
But my mind at that time was really in a lot of turnoil and that old fear caught up with me. To make a long story short, I ended up "asking Jesus into my heart" -- again. At this point I was finally back on the road on route to heaven -- relief from the fear of going to Hell (at least temporarily).
Around 20 years old I met some guy from a Penticost denomination that ended up having me convinced that I had somehow "lost my salvation". This was one of the most horrific and agonizing times of my life.
The fear of going to Hell was so intense at that time that I literally tore my arms and hands to feel pain to take my mind off of the feeling of terror that gripped my soul. What finally relieved my of the anxiety and panic attacks from the fear of some day going to Hell was valium and convincing myself over and over "once saved always saved", that Daddy taught me.
But there was always that tiny doubt way down inside that kept that little spark of the fear of Hell alive. I never knew for sure what lied before me beyond the grave. Maybe at some point in my life I had committed that unpardonable sin of "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost". I tried to find anything in the bible that might forever put an end to my secret suffering, but there were things in the bible that made my doubts even more founded.
The bible itself actually seemed to make the reality of Hell a real possibility, but on the other hand contradicted itself in all the verses I read about the subject. And what most people had on the subject were merely interpretations and their own favorite verses. There was just nothing really concrete, no certainty in the bible, and no agreement among Christians about what things exactly meant. Everything was so unclear. So that fear just lingered.
I figured that if I'm going to Hell, maybe if I do a lot of good in my life at least Hell won't be so hot for me, if in fact I did have to go there (funny idea, isn't it). I gave the best years of my life to God as a missionary for nearly 20 years and "won lots of souls".
However, the anxiety lived with me just the same all those years. It seemed it didn't matter what I did, the anxiety just kept on and on -- and religion just served to make it even worse. I searched in many different denominations of Christianity, but I never found relief from the fear of Hell. I finally got disillusioned with all the falsehoods and contradictory doctrines and gave up on it all. But the anxiety just kept hanging around.
At some point I was drinking to use alcohol as a "coping mechanism". At least there were times that I could just feel numb and when I wasn't numb, drinking was something that I could look forward to. Drinking was something I got pretty good at covering up for many years. Valium seemed to work well for a while but I quit that since I was afraid that I would get addicted to it.
It just seemed like God was always mad at me for some strange reason that I never could quite figure out, and no matter what I did I couldn't get on his good side. No matter what I did, it seemed I was seemed failing God. Now I know that that was all in my imagination and instilled in me by religion.
After some years, it looked like things were starting to get a little better. However, someone tried to convince me that Jesus was actually God. I wasn't supposed to pray directly to God, but only through Jesus. I never could get my head around that trinity idea -- that there were 3 gods but they actually all one God. That never did make sense to me and as much as I read the bible, it didn't seem that the bible taught that either (except in places that were interpolated).
I finally ended up was deciding to throw it all out, start all over from scratch, and figure it out for myself. I sincerely prayed and prayed, read the bible and studied and researched.
What I came up with was so much different than anything that I had been taught and heard from pulpits. I still haven't got all the answers, but I now understand at least why I was under such bondage of fear for all those years. I discovered that religion uses the fear of Hell on people to enable them to use and manipulate people and I was just another one of its victims.
However, little did I realize or at least admit to myself that the alcohol was addicting me. I had the sneeking feeling that I might be an alcoholic, but it was hard to admit it to myself. When I finally did decide that I would try to quit, I couldn't. After about 3 days I would get these headaches and anxiety and go back to the alcohol for relief. My body had gotten accustomed to coping with my anxiety through alcohol.
As I was trying to figure out the truth about the bible and Jesus, I ended up discovering that Jesus wasn't God at all, nor was he even the Messiah -- and all this I discovered just reading the bible for myself. And whatever the bible was, there is no way of knowing now after 2000 years. The bible has been so chopped up, added to, modified and corrupted etc., that it is obvious that there is very little left of what it was originally.
I could go on and on about that (you can read about that on this website -- http://truthorheresy.com/how-i-became-an-ex-christian), but since the New Testament is the basis of Christianity, and it is unreliable and has been so corrupted over hundreds of years that I realized that it couldn't possibly be God's word nor is it inerrant and is not valid for almost anything in my life. Now I realize that Christianity is all a myth and Hell is a big fat lie created to scare people into submission.
The answer for me was deprogramming my mind from the idea of Hell and Christianity. I have finally kicked the addiction of alcohol with the help of detoxing myself with Kava and the lie of Hell has finally become a thing of the past.
The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe