2000 years of lies

sent in by David Maas

I have decided to write about how I left. I was born into a Christian family. I went to a Christian school from K to 12, so I had 13 years of day in day out indoctrination. The church I was brought up in was the Christian Reform church and I was treated quite well. My family was poor and they did help us out a lot financially, so we wouldn't become homeless and go hungry. This also one of the reasons I stayed a Christian so long.

My deconversion started when I was quite young. My first memory of questioning the Bible was when I was in Kindergarten. The teacher was reading to us a story about dinosaurs, and there was a line in the story the said something like "millions of years before man dinosaurs roamed the earth." Well my school taught that creation took only 6 days, so I asked, "How can this be true, if it only took 6 days to create the world?" The teacher said that she didn't know and that was that. I was always very suspicious of many things taught to me as a child. I can remember a lot of little things that didn't make any sense from the Bible. I really felt sorry for the Canaanites in the Old Test. I really felt God was a mean and cruel god. I also thought that if God is all powerful, why did he have to kill his son for us? If God is all knowing, why then did he make us knowing most of us would end up in hell? As a young child I thought about all those things.

College was the best thing for me since it exposed me to people who weren?t Christian. I also really start to dislike most Christians during college. I found them boring, petty, judgmental and two faced; so most my friends were not Christians. I felt bad that they were all going to hell if they didn't convert. I thought God was really unfair to them. They were good people and more loving to others them most of my Christians acquaintances. Also, I was friends with a lot of gays and lesbians and according to the Bible they were the worse people and going straight to hell.

After college I started to acknowledge that most of the Bible was not literally true. It all started when a friend of mine pointed out to me that if God is love then all my unbelieving friends will not go to hell. Since God is perfect and I am not perfect and I don't want them to go hell then he most definitely doesn?t want them to go to hell and won't send them to hell. It took awhile for me to believe this since I was a literalist at the time. I would have say around this time I became a liberal Christian and stayed that way for several years. I even found a church that was liberal enough for me. They believed that everyone could get to heaven, but Christianity was the better way because it didn't demand works. I could live with this, and got quite involved with that church.

About 3 years ago I moved to Singapore. At first I went to my wife's church. This is when I really started to see what Christianity is really like. Her church preaches what I call a message of hate. It is a hate for yourself and others. The minister would always preach about how you are not good enough and no matter how hard you try you will never be good enough. He would also preach that God isn't answering your prayers because you don't pray right. This church also followed various methods of mind of control. The music would be so loud you could not even hear yourself sing. Also, they would repeat the song about 10 times before they would stop. This would go on for about 45 minutes, and by the end everyone would be so wired and their brains would be fried. Also, this church teaches that you are not supposed to trust your own reason and everything that you think is wrong. This really pissed me off since I am engineer/scientist and everything I think generally involves logic and reason.

After a few months I stopped going to that church and my wife goes by herself. I tried finding a liberal church, but in Singapore there is none. Since I had no one to guide me spiritually, I started to read books about Christianity and its history as a way to fill the void. What I found made me leave Christianity all together. It is all pretty much a fairy tale. It is a message of hate and anger. It is about a petty god and who is more akin to what people think Satan is. The people who put the Bible together were a bunch of evil men who wanted power and hate women. Christianity has killed more people then any other religion. After reading all this history, I get sick when I think about Christianity. It should be destroyed, since it is destroying everything else.

So I haven't been a Christian for about 1.5 years. My wife knows I am not a Christian and it makes her very sad since to her I am going to hell. Also, it ruined her dreams about having a perfect family. For her sake sometimes I wish I could go back, but I can't. Now I hope that she can someday see the light and leave the church, but all her friends are there, so there is a great social pressure for her to stay.

Thanks for reading my story. I still have a lot of anger towards Christianity. I do believe Christians need our understanding and help since many of them have been broken by their churches to think they are worthless and unworthy of happiness and anything good.
Singapore
Born into it
33
Was: Christian Reformed, Methodist
Converted because: There might be something out there
De-converted because: History and reason killed it!
Email: dmaas15ATYahoo_dot_com

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