I feel threatened by Christianity
I honestly feel a bit threatened by Christianity. Well, God, to be exact. Is that the same thing? *Must not commit sins*
Even as I write this article, I’m scared that I’m committing some sort of sin. I feel like someone is going to yell “blasphemy!!!” right to my face. I’ve had that experience before, actually.
I grew up in a Christian household. I was propagated with the usual “if you don’t believe in God, you’re going to burn in hell for the rest of eternity.” As a five-year-old, I didn’t like the idea of burning in hell and I didn’t have an opinion or a philosophy of my own so I didn’t really question anything. I just simply believed. Or tried to. It was difficult for a five-year-old to grasp the concept of an almighty God whom you cannot see or talk to is looking upon you at all times. Considering that fact that I was a five-year-old who didn’t even believe in Santa Claus even when there was material evidence (aka gifts under the trees) to prove so, it was kind of hard for me to believe in a God.
But I was told that it was Satan trying to get into my head and mess with me, making me doubt. Like what the hell that was some next-level shit. So I decided to just shut it and pray.
And then I was baptised when I was 13 and by then I believed that everything that happened to be was God’s sign. I even cried thanking God for showing me the way. I don’t really remember what that “way” was.
And then I decided to stop attending church. At first, it was because I had to go to a boarding school and it was physically impossible for me to actually go to church. But then I realised that church was just another facility made by capitalist, greedy human beings and I decided that it wasn’t God’s wishes for me to pay like 10 dollars every time I went there. I was already so poor, I didn’t think god wanted me to be broke. (When I say poor, I mean like student-poor with no adequate source of income)
At school, there was a Christian club that gathered at 9:20PM and prayed so I joined up with them and prayed and cried and sang hallelujah, et cetera.
But then I started to you know, learn. Break out of this Christian bubble. I think I saw this documentary called Zeitgeist that talked about how religion was born, what common factors religions around the world have, I started to question whether Christianity was this almighty religion that was the best and everyone else was going to die and burn in hell.
For me, God wasn't that kind of…being. It seemed incredibly…human to say that if you aren’t mine, you can’t be anyone else’s and therefore you will burn in hell!!! It just seemed pretty selfish and I thought that was a human quality, not God’s. I thought we all wanted to go to heaven and be free of greed, not be controlled by the greed of an almighty being.
By the time I started questioning Christianity, the American elections happened and I was honestly just fed up with the Christian beliefs that sometimes (not always) justified misogyny and homophobia and et cetera. I don’t really have a thing against religions as a whole but some beliefs and code of conducts (ex: how Muslims treat women) kind of make me uncomfortable as a feminist in the 21st Century.
Even my own mother believed that women were inherently inferior to men. My mother told me that women were made with one rib of a man, to support him, to bear his child. So basically women were made from a man’s bone, and we were just… tools? My mother told me that it’s not particularly important for me to get into an Ivy League because I was a girl and it was more socially acceptable for me to just not succeed professionally and stay at home. In contrast, she wanted me to teach English and Chinese to my brother after I graduated high school so that my brother could get into Yale. I had no problem teaching my brother but the fact that she put it like that sort of pissed me off.
So after years of pondering and talking to other Atheists around me and discussing Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, I decided that I was going to be an Atheist.
My mother freaked out. She told me that my dad’s father was a Shaman and it’s “in my blood” to be lured by unholy things and she took away all of my Nietzsche books, calling them “Satan’s luring.” I obviously got really mad at her and told her “Christianity is a load of bullshit and you’re only scared of dying — you don’t really believe in God!”
Shouldn’t have done that, but anyways it happened and things between us were not so great for a while. But I apologised and told her that I’m sorry for saying what I said but I can’t force myself into believing in something that I’m not. She told me that she only wanted me to believe because she loved me and she didn’t want to see me burn in hell. Understandably so.
She told me to read the bible. She told me that it was the number one bestseller worldwide and in all of history. She told me that there was a reason that America was so affluent and she told me it was because America is a predominantly Christian country. I told her that it was because they have a monopoly on the dollar. She doesn’t like logical arguments like that. She told me logic was enforced by Satan and told me not to question it.
It all just kind of made sense. Why truth was becoming so rare these days. It becomes exceptionally hard for you to be logical and skeptical if you believed in religion. Not to say that all religious people are illogical and unreasonable. But I’m sure this has something to do with it. It becomes a motivator to jusitfy anything that goes against human logic. You don’t need to justify it — justifying it is blasphemy.
You see, I don’t consider myself a super-atheist in which you don’t believe in any higher being or spirit or whatever and you think that humans are the only sentient beings here in the universe. I think even looking at it factually and scientifically, it seems far-fetched to believe that we’re the only things here in the universe. And I’m not opposed to believing in a higher power and I personally believe that there are spirits within us and there is an afterlife — whether that is heaven or hell — and I believe that you are going to be held accountable for what you have done in this life in the afterlife.
But I don’t think Christianity should be the only thing that interprets this higher power. I think that Christianity was also a manmade approach to interpreting spirituality and higher power and I think other religions were also a different take on this particular subject. You know how there are many different types of literature? I think religions are the same, since there are differences and also commonalities and therefore we should just let it go and let everyone have their own religion or non-religion since, in hindsight, is just another interpretation of how one sees the world. Just stop threatening each other with fire and hell.
I honestly just feel very conflicted about this situation and I’m sort of scared. I remember my feminist “enlightenment” and my realisation that I was bisexual and how I was so scared of going to hell. Nobody wants to go to hell. My mother tells me if it’s a 50/50 chance that God is real or not real, why not go with real? Well, I told her I don’t want to live my whole life scared of something I don’t know.
Nevertheless, it seems that I can’t escape this fear. Should I just go back to being fully Christian?
Asking for advice.
