Religion Rant Part 1
How I was raised
Okay I know this blog is titled "i hate christianity" but that's honestly more of an attemtion grabbing headline rather than a reflection of my actual opinion. This is just going to be a general discussion of religion and spirituality in general and why I am not a fan of it. Hopefully it will make people at least a little upset, but still generate some meaningful discussion.
So a lot of you may already know this but I was raised Roman Catholic as was the rest of my family. Now Catholics are obviously similar to most other christian groups but there are a few differences. First off, they believe that when u drink the wine and eat the bread (eucharist) that it is literally the blood and body of jesus. like its not a metaphor it is literally blood and flesh. Now in real life is there any measurable difference between blessed/non blessed eucharist bread? No, but still that's what Catholics believe, and I also believed it for a time. The other thing unique about Catholics is the Pope, which honestly I like the Pope. Now granted he still believes a lot of dumb stuff but Pope Francis has been more accepting of LGBT people as well as calling out Israel for the awful shit they've been doing in Gaza to the Palestinians. Stuff like that I can commend, but the main point is that the Pope is an infallible representative of God. Supposedly the first Pope was the disciple Peter, as Jesus said "you are my rock upon which I will build this church". The last thing that distinguishes Catholics from other denominations of christians, or at least this is what my mom always told me, was that "it was the only denomination founded by Jesus. While this is kinda technically true it's misleading as hell. With the Protestant reformation it could be argued that the Catholic Church had strayed from its course, and wasn't really what it should've been, and that the Protestant movement was a correction of what Catholics did wrong.
Now I do have gripes with Protestants but it is purely for phony aesthetical reasons, like them having lame churches and lame priests. You go to a Catholic Church and its like WAAAAAH! You know it's just a great buliding to walk into. Meanwhile you walk into a Protestant church and it's like ok when are the middle schoolers gonna start their band recital. And don't even get me STARTED on Mega churches. Just an absolute mockery of Jesus. It's just a glorified concert. If you wanted a concert you could at least go to a real artist's concert and listen to some real music. And it's not even church music that they play in the first place.If you go to a Catholic church youll hear shit like The King of Glory and They'll know we are Christians. Real fucking songs that God would actually be proud to hear.
Ok sorry about that digression back to how I was raised. So you know what Catholics believe so I'll go into the specifics of my Catholic Life. Two weeks after I was born I was baptized. Now you may think that its bizzare to get a baby involved with a religion that it can't even comprehend, and you would be right. I should note in other relgions baptism is something that happens to you in either your adult years or your late teenage years. I like this way more since you actually can comprehend what's happening to you and it's not just being forced on you. Now aside from Baptism you're also gonna be going to church every single Sunday for the entirety of your life, typically at 9 AM or 11 AM. I don't have to explain how boring it can be as a child to sit still for an hour in a place you dont care about. I mean a lot of you nerds have some form of ADHD, you know what it's like trying to concentrate in school. It's basically that same feeling, although I'd argue church is worse due to the added kneeling and standing. if you got bad knees then a Catholic Church is not the place for you. Now I wanna get ahead of some people and say that no, these minor gripes are not the reason I'm not a christian anymore. I'm not a child although I am pretty immature, I promise I have good reasons for deconverting.
Now for the first 6 years of your life you'll essentially repeat this process every week, until finally you start going to school, and you know what that means! After School Church Classes every Wednesday! This is the part of Christianity that I would honestly consider brainwashing. Every Wednesday after school I would take the bus to the town over to do an hour and a half of Catechism (the teaching of Christianity). What they do here is they essentially pump your brain full of stories from the bible, making sure that you accept them at face value, which they know you will do since you are a child who has no understanding of the real world. Noah's Ark, Jonah and the Whale, David in the Lions Den, those were some examples of the stories we were told as absolute truth. Now there are a boatload of problems with these stories, especially Noah's Ark which I'll go into further, but as a kid who knows nothing about science or geography and has no critical thinking skills these stories sound perfectly reasonable. And I think thats the really slimy part of this all.
Now once you hit second grade that's when you become old enough to recieve the eucharist. You know the eating of the flesh and blood I mentioned earlier? Now you get to be a part of it!Now at the same time you have your first eucharist you'll also have your first confession. Confession is maybe one of the creepiest parts of being a catholic, and something I never got on board with. What it is is you go into a little box room where there's a priest covered by a curtain or thin wall on the other side and you tell him all the sins you've commmitted since your last confession. You speak to him through a little hole in the wall so neither of you can see each other, which is honestly kind of a feigned attempt at anonymity. If you went to a small enough church like I did then everyone pretty much already knew each other and their voices. Now I don't know about you, but I was not exactly on board with the idea of telling this strange old man all the horrible things I get up to in my life. Granted, the priest is not allowed to tell people what you confess to them, so they can't tell your parents if you did something bad, but I still didn't like telling the priest my sins. I could feel them judging me every time after I left the confession box, so I ended up just lying and saying the same two sins every time I went to confession. Now you might think "hey isn;t that just another sin" and well maybe it is, but there is a part of confession where you say "for these sins and all the sins of my life I am sorry" I thought that God would know which sins I didn't want to tell the priest and that he would still forgive me anyways. And I don't even wanna get into some of the things that Catholics consider "sins". Maybe later but now let's just keep going.
So you continue going to church and catechism as usual and then around 5th or 6th grade you get "Confirmed". What this means is that the Bishop (a bishop is essentially just the pope for whatever State you live in. I live in Nebraska so my Bishop was James D Conley) comes to your church and confirms you as a Catholic or something. Honestly this is kinda one of the lamer sacraments. But continuing on I was finally in my teenage years. Once you get into junior high instead of Catechism you start going to "CYO"(Catholic Youth Group). I hated this even more than Catechism because you had to show up later in the day, and stay for an extra hour longer. So if you had any plans for Wednesday evenings, no you didn't.
It was at this point in my life where I really started to question a lot of the different parts of the bible. I had just recently learned about evolution, something I thought was really cool. I liked the ways that we could see animals evolve through the history of the earth. But with this came conflictiing views of the world. My religion told me that the world was created 6000 years ago with Adam and Eve, and that every living being was created in its curent form the way it is now, but my school taught me that the earth and the universe were billions of years old, and that all life had a common ancestor that evolved, rather than was created. Now I had tried to mesh these two viewpoints together so I could remain a "true christian". I reasoned that maybe Adam and Eve were the first humans, or maybe god had just guided evolution to make humans the way they were. But over time I realized that It was either one way or the other. These two worldviews were incompatible, and I eventually let go of the biblical creation story in favor of the theory of evolution. It simply just made much more sense and had a much better factual basis.
Another big strain on my tether to christianity was gay people. For whatever reason my family never talked to me about gay people and jammed it in my brain that "being gay was a sin" which I am very thankful for because that meant I was able to discover gay people on my own, and what I found I was perfectly fine with. I remember reading a Captain underpants book where George and Harold go to the future to find their older selves, and in the future Harold had a husband. It was a really interesting way of representation because it didn't even call any attention to itself. Harold's husband was treated no different than George's wife and that really helped me empathise with gay people at my age. I knew I would have to keep that part of the book a secret from my parents, otherwise they probably wouldn't have let me read Captain Underpants books anymore. This is not to say that I was quiet about my beliefs on gay people. I remember my parents yelling at me for going against what the bible says, but I just didn't see the harm in gay marriage. And that's essentially because there is no real problem with gay people, other than the fact that it makes some christians feel icky. I'll go more into this later but just know that if a christian is homophobic, that is their own decision. It has nothing to do with their relgion, other than the religion being an excuse for their bigotry.
Now along with evolution and gay people I just generally started having more doubts about Christianity. I stopped believing in many other biblical stories like Noah's Ark, and Jonah in the Whale, as while they sounded plausible to me as a child I recognized how ridiculous they really were. I was in the 7th grade now and I had finally started to learn more about other religions such as Islam. Now I new there were other religions, but I was always able to dismiss them as just a small group of crazy people who didn't know the REAL god. But when I actually learned about Islam I realized that these people believe their religion the same way that I believed mine. I wondered whether I could be so sure about my religious beliefs, since I had seen these people also be extremely devoted to their beliefs. We couldn't both be right, and with how many other religions there were how could I possibly know that nine was the correct one. Another factor was just how huge the universe is. There is so much of the universe that we could never even possibly hope to SEE, yet it all exists. It didn't make much sense that God would create all of the universe just to focus on a tiny speck of it on very specific parts of a small planet.
It was around this time in my life where I started to examine why I believed what I believed, not just with religion, but with politics. Some of you may know this already but I used to be a Trump supporter back during the start of his first term. Now I was just a dipshit 11 year old at the time, so I can't be too hard on myself, but back then I was very easily swayed by emotion rather than actually reasoning out what I believed. During the next three years I would come to understand that I didn't like any of the policies that Trump or republicans promoted, I was just tricked into believing that a small portion of crazy people on the internet represented ALL of the left. When I realized I had been lied to I started identifying as a Democrat since my beliefs did not line up with the Republicans or Trump. I started listebibg to people I disagreed with and I think that was what helped me become a much better person. I bring this all up to say that in mid-2020 I had a very similar thing happen with religion. It was the first few months of the pandemic and I had been stuck in my room for a long time at that point. It was sometime in May that I came upon a video from a guy names "Armoured Skeptic". He was an atheist youtuber. Now typically when I saw an atheist youtuber or anything "anti christian" the most engagement I would have with it would be to click on the video, dislike it, and then immediately click off. There was a youtuber I liked called "NateIsLame" who made a video about why he was an atheist. At the time that video made me so mad I just disliked it, unsubscribed from him, and never thought about it again. But for whatever reason this time seeing this armoured skeptic video I decided to make a change and actually watch it. Maybe it was because I was so bored during the pandemic that I would watch lierally anything. Now the video was of him making fun of this christian priest who tried to claim that evolution and the big bang theory were all made up so I figured I would watch it through as I was already a "old-earth creationist". I found the video funny so I decided ot watch a few more of his videos, and then more. and like
Damn
every thought that had been bubbling in my head about christianity finally became clear. Everything AS said about christianity just made sense. I didn't have to bend over backwards to justify meshing biblical stories with reality. I didn't have to do rocket science to explain why gay people didn't deserve to burn in hell forever. Everyting finally made sense to me. I finally knew what I believed, and I was an atheist, and I've been the same ever since that day five years ago.
Now this doesn't mean that it's been all sunshine and rainbows ever since then. I still have yet to tell my parents I'm atheist and continue to go to church every sunday as well as christian events to make them happy. However I understand the world a lot more and now I'ms a lot.. well I wouldn't say im happier necessarily but I'm no longer scared of burning in Hell forever. That's gotta count for something.
Now as you can see this blog has gone on a lot longer than I originally intended.I've decided to make this into a two parter. This first half is focused on my upbringing and I think the next half will be more focused on explaining my beliefs in detail as well as debunking a lot of the reasons I was originally christian. ANyways thank you for reading this all the way and please tell me what you think! I know a lot of you were not raised relgiously so I wanna know what you think of my story. Is it nuts is it rather tame idk. Anyways have a great day everyone!