Why I'm Going Straight to Hell
Jan. 24th, 2013 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljwritesGo to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.
-Mark Twain
So I casually mentioned onsohawkeward's LJ that I used to be Christian, and she asked me why that was in the past tense. It was a fair question, since I was the one who brought it up after all. The answer wasn't nearly as simple as the question, though, and a few days passed between thinking too hard about it and real life being its usual self. Since the answer got long and involved, I decided to put it in a blog post instead. I did a version of this post in Korean some years ago, but my thoughts have changed and hopefully matured since then.
The short answer to the question of why I'm no longer Christian is that the Christian church has been a source of strife and pain for me far more than a source of learning or growth, and I feel I can pursue my spirituality better outside of it. Also, I'm too lazy to go to church on Sundays.
The long answer: I'd like to start by saying this is a tradition I highly respect and have a lot of affection for. My father is a Christian, and so was my mother until she passed away. (So I guess being a Christian isn't past tense for her, but it's awkward to use the present tense for someone who isn't alive anymore, so.) Most of my close friends are Christian by way of Catholicism, and my husband is, quite unusually for a Korean, a Greek Orthodox Christian though he hasn't been to church for years and I happen to know there are certain sins he is very enthusiastic about. I love reading the Bible, though I'm more interested in literary than literal readings, and like everyone and their brother I think Jesus was way cool.
So I don't hate Christianity, and I don't think Christians or any other religious people are misguided or irrational. Self-important atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins might prattle on about how can you believe in virgin births and the dead coming back to life etc., to which I say, it's their loss if they don't understand the role of story and storytelling in human life. I swear, the most insufferable atheists are as bad as the fundamentalists they're always complaining about, just as smug, close-minded, and condescending. They think they have all the answers and they just need to preach it from this pedestal they've placed themselves on, and they can just enlighten the rest of us with the light of their wisdom. If I wanted the company of people who just wanted to talk at me instead of to me I'd have stayed in church, thank you very much.
Which is a long way of saying I'm not out to invalidate anyone's experiences or faith, so if anyone religious is looking for outrage or any atheist for validation they'll have to look elsewhere. I'm talking about my experience, no one else's.
My earliest memory of religion is one of terror. I was deathly afraid of going to hell, and it was a constant thought on my mind. Part of this probably had to do with my Presbyterian church teaching the doctrine of predestination, that people were either destined to be saved or not. Rather than instill in me the pride of being one of the chosen, it instilled in me the fear that I wasn't really chosen and God would correct that little clerical error once he knew me. Or maybe He'd just randomly decide he didn't like me.
Looking back, God to me was probably Dad. It's probably not a coincidence that my vision of a capricious heavenly father who would berate me for my faults, then keep me obedient through the dread of losing His love forever, so closely matched the worst of my earthly father's flaws. As a child I lived in both terror and adoration, but as I grew up and started to see how my dad controlled me through fear. I saw that parallel in my thoughts of hell, and my distance from the one contributed to my distance from the other.
My second memory of religion is one of outrage. See, I used to be a pretty diligent student of the Bible, got prizes in my church's elementary division and everything. When a sermon bored me, as it often did, I reached for the nearest reading material available. The parts I read were the parts that didn't come up too often in sermons, like God commanding the Israelites to kill the Canaanites and rape their virgins, or Paul ordering women to be silent in church. (Castrati through the years can thank him for that one, I guess.) I just couldn't reconcile the thought of an all-loving and all-good God with genocide and sexism, any more than I could wrap my mind around the thought of a God who loved everyone but condemns a lot of them to eternal torture. It did not compute.
I reached out to different people trying to resolve my doubts, but the answers I received were variations of a) shut up and pray or b) you're going to hell. Yeah yeah, God works in mysterious ways and how can a mere human hope to understand His plans, but if we were created in His image weren't our reason and urge for justice also divine traits that He wanted us to use? We might not be able to figure everything out, but what was the harm in trying?
My third memory of religion is one of alienation. I never felt "with it" in my church's social circle, and I hated the way they talked about each other behind each other's backs, their petty feuds and mutual contempt. It was obviously a repeat of school, but my church was composed of the coolest kids from school and I was never that cool. I thought the adults were much more tolerable, but I wasn't old enough to be a part of their circle.
In college, because my parents wanted me to and because I was in the habit, I tried to find another church to join. I never quite fit into the first one, which was a really close-knit group that didn't have much room for an outsider. Ironically that was probably the best experience, because the other attempts to join a church were just one disaster after another. There were the weirdo fringe groups, the borderline stalkerish episodes, long talks where I was repeatedly told I was far too arrogant (a possibility I concede) and that my pride needed to be broken (abuse senses... tingling...).
After the fifth attempt at joining a church in my freshman year, I quit. I just couldn't do it anymore. When my parents asked I lied and said I'd been to church, which was just a continuation of deceiving them rather than talking about the things that mattered to me. I'd tried talking before, why would I subject myself to belittlement and dismissal again?
There are a bunch of other things I could talk about, such as the way organized religion tends to ossify existing convention by buttressing them with divine rather than human sanction, the terrible history of just about every religious denomination you can name, and that spirituality, which matters to me a lot, does not have to take place in the framework of organized religion. Others have said these things and said them better, though, so I have confined myself mostly to what I can talk about better than anyone else, which is what my experience with church has been like. And my spirituality should be a post of its own, if I ever get around to writing it.
I don't know if leaving the church has made me a better person or not, but I do know I'm happier for it. It's a good feeling not to be constantly afraid, to trust my own perceptions and convictions without having to compromise who I am and what I believe, to associate with people I like and whom I can learn from. I'm glad I've gotten out, though obviously my life has no bearing on anyone else's path. I like that we're all different people with different lives and thoughts; if everyone were like me life would be horribly dull. I like that no one has all the answers. Humans have to each other because we don't know everything, and whatever the truth of everything might be (hint: 42) I think it's as much in the dialogue as in the conclusion. I know even less than most, having no idea whether there is a God or gods or what happens after death, and I'm happy with that ignorance. It keeps me looking, and it's a journey I thoroughly enjoy.
-Mark Twain
So I casually mentioned on
sohawkeward's LJ that I used to be Christian, and she asked me why that was in the past tense. It was a fair question, since I was the one who brought it up after all. The answer wasn't nearly as simple as the question, though, and a few days passed between thinking too hard about it and real life being its usual self. Since the answer got long and involved, I decided to put it in a blog post instead. I did a version of this post in Korean some years ago, but my thoughts have changed and hopefully matured since then.The short answer to the question of why I'm no longer Christian is that the Christian church has been a source of strife and pain for me far more than a source of learning or growth, and I feel I can pursue my spirituality better outside of it. Also, I'm too lazy to go to church on Sundays.
The long answer: I'd like to start by saying this is a tradition I highly respect and have a lot of affection for. My father is a Christian, and so was my mother until she passed away. (So I guess being a Christian isn't past tense for her, but it's awkward to use the present tense for someone who isn't alive anymore, so.) Most of my close friends are Christian by way of Catholicism, and my husband is, quite unusually for a Korean, a Greek Orthodox Christian though he hasn't been to church for years and I happen to know there are certain sins he is very enthusiastic about. I love reading the Bible, though I'm more interested in literary than literal readings, and like everyone and their brother I think Jesus was way cool.
So I don't hate Christianity, and I don't think Christians or any other religious people are misguided or irrational. Self-important atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins might prattle on about how can you believe in virgin births and the dead coming back to life etc., to which I say, it's their loss if they don't understand the role of story and storytelling in human life. I swear, the most insufferable atheists are as bad as the fundamentalists they're always complaining about, just as smug, close-minded, and condescending. They think they have all the answers and they just need to preach it from this pedestal they've placed themselves on, and they can just enlighten the rest of us with the light of their wisdom. If I wanted the company of people who just wanted to talk at me instead of to me I'd have stayed in church, thank you very much.
Which is a long way of saying I'm not out to invalidate anyone's experiences or faith, so if anyone religious is looking for outrage or any atheist for validation they'll have to look elsewhere. I'm talking about my experience, no one else's.
My earliest memory of religion is one of terror. I was deathly afraid of going to hell, and it was a constant thought on my mind. Part of this probably had to do with my Presbyterian church teaching the doctrine of predestination, that people were either destined to be saved or not. Rather than instill in me the pride of being one of the chosen, it instilled in me the fear that I wasn't really chosen and God would correct that little clerical error once he knew me. Or maybe He'd just randomly decide he didn't like me.
Looking back, God to me was probably Dad. It's probably not a coincidence that my vision of a capricious heavenly father who would berate me for my faults, then keep me obedient through the dread of losing His love forever, so closely matched the worst of my earthly father's flaws. As a child I lived in both terror and adoration, but as I grew up and started to see how my dad controlled me through fear. I saw that parallel in my thoughts of hell, and my distance from the one contributed to my distance from the other.
My second memory of religion is one of outrage. See, I used to be a pretty diligent student of the Bible, got prizes in my church's elementary division and everything. When a sermon bored me, as it often did, I reached for the nearest reading material available. The parts I read were the parts that didn't come up too often in sermons, like God commanding the Israelites to kill the Canaanites and rape their virgins, or Paul ordering women to be silent in church. (Castrati through the years can thank him for that one, I guess.) I just couldn't reconcile the thought of an all-loving and all-good God with genocide and sexism, any more than I could wrap my mind around the thought of a God who loved everyone but condemns a lot of them to eternal torture. It did not compute.
I reached out to different people trying to resolve my doubts, but the answers I received were variations of a) shut up and pray or b) you're going to hell. Yeah yeah, God works in mysterious ways and how can a mere human hope to understand His plans, but if we were created in His image weren't our reason and urge for justice also divine traits that He wanted us to use? We might not be able to figure everything out, but what was the harm in trying?
My third memory of religion is one of alienation. I never felt "with it" in my church's social circle, and I hated the way they talked about each other behind each other's backs, their petty feuds and mutual contempt. It was obviously a repeat of school, but my church was composed of the coolest kids from school and I was never that cool. I thought the adults were much more tolerable, but I wasn't old enough to be a part of their circle.
In college, because my parents wanted me to and because I was in the habit, I tried to find another church to join. I never quite fit into the first one, which was a really close-knit group that didn't have much room for an outsider. Ironically that was probably the best experience, because the other attempts to join a church were just one disaster after another. There were the weirdo fringe groups, the borderline stalkerish episodes, long talks where I was repeatedly told I was far too arrogant (a possibility I concede) and that my pride needed to be broken (abuse senses... tingling...).
After the fifth attempt at joining a church in my freshman year, I quit. I just couldn't do it anymore. When my parents asked I lied and said I'd been to church, which was just a continuation of deceiving them rather than talking about the things that mattered to me. I'd tried talking before, why would I subject myself to belittlement and dismissal again?
There are a bunch of other things I could talk about, such as the way organized religion tends to ossify existing convention by buttressing them with divine rather than human sanction, the terrible history of just about every religious denomination you can name, and that spirituality, which matters to me a lot, does not have to take place in the framework of organized religion. Others have said these things and said them better, though, so I have confined myself mostly to what I can talk about better than anyone else, which is what my experience with church has been like. And my spirituality should be a post of its own, if I ever get around to writing it.
I don't know if leaving the church has made me a better person or not, but I do know I'm happier for it. It's a good feeling not to be constantly afraid, to trust my own perceptions and convictions without having to compromise who I am and what I believe, to associate with people I like and whom I can learn from. I'm glad I've gotten out, though obviously my life has no bearing on anyone else's path. I like that we're all different people with different lives and thoughts; if everyone were like me life would be horribly dull. I like that no one has all the answers. Humans have to each other because we don't know everything, and whatever the truth of everything might be (hint: 42) I think it's as much in the dialogue as in the conclusion. I know even less than most, having no idea whether there is a God or gods or what happens after death, and I'm happy with that ignorance. It keeps me looking, and it's a journey I thoroughly enjoy.
