I want to start this blog by saying first and foremost I am not attacking faith, hope, love, or the individuals right to believe whatever they feel in their heart.. However, this will come off as a jab at religion in general. I don’t mean to offend, I’m merely sharing my experiences involving religion and the church. I encourage believers and non-believers alike to keep an open mind.
This is a before, during, and after story about my time in the church.
I have always had a spiritual nature about me. I believe we all do, it’s inherent. Some people are content with accepting that we can’t know for sure why we’re here and what for, but I and others like myself need something more than that. The pressure to ease my nerves on the issue of life after death became so intense that it was as if my survival and sanity depended on reaching a conclusion!
I remember as a kid I would have thoughts about eternity that would bring on panic attacks and I’d have sleepless nights of wondering and worrying about what happens after you die.
It wasn’t until I was 15 that I was introduced through a friend to Christianity.
It flipped my world upside down.
Not only did I feel this overwhelming sense of clarity being able to finally answer the million dollar questions in my life, but I went from being an everyday teenage hooligan to a christian poster boy. I sang in the church band on Sunday mornings, read my bible almost daily and surrounded myself with people who were “like minded” Christians. I even transferred from a public high school to a private Christian school.
For years all seemed right in the world. There were still those doubts that would leer their ugly heads once and a while, but I wrote them off as either God testing my faith or the devil using the usual tactics to turn me to the dark side. You know the classic doubts; dinosaurs, Noah’s ark and the flood, Jonah and the whale, Moses parting the red sea.. And that’s just the old testament.
Around this same time I was starting to feel under constant scrutiny by the church, like I was being monitored to see what a good or bad Christian I was being all the time. I started to see how unfair and how unrealistic the standards of the church are and how those standards can lead someone to surrounding their life in feelings of extreme guilt, fear and allowing no room in their life for being an individual. This led me to question what really made Christianity any different than any other religion.
All religions, when you get down to it, are just different interpretations of how/why we’re here and what for.
Christianity (especially in America) is the most popular, the most tolerated, and pretty damn rich. Just because something has more followers doesn’t mean it’s any more right (i.e. Justin Bieber, Jersey Shore, so on and so forth).
The point is, I had come to a crossroads in my life.
There was never a finite moment in time when I denounced my faith and never looked back, but over time I started to see a very distinct line between religion and spirituality.
We don’t NEED to subscribe to a certain religion in order to experience or feel spiritual or even experience the supernatural. What we NEED to do as a species is start taking joy and comfort in the fact that we’re not alone in feeling like there is something more to this all. I wish we were able to share our love and appreciation for one another’s religious beliefs, but as history has showed us, it doesn’t really work like that.
It doesn’t matter if you were born in America, Uganda, Iraq, India, China or wherever! It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, republican or democrat! The fact remains that we’re all here together and we all feel, something. God, the universe, whatever it is we can all agree on a presence of some sort or some kind of feeling we get when contemplating the universe and our existence.
I know it might sound ambitious, even cliché and probably really sacrilegious, but I believe we need to seriously reconsider religion in general if we wish to achieve peace on earth. We’re moving toward a future in technology that is either going to prove extremely beneficial scientifically, educationally, medically and peacefully.. Or prove to destroy us with our also advanced military technology in the hands of either religious extremists or even in the hands of a country itself hiding behind religion to justify war. You can tell me that’s a crazy prediction, but it’s happened before.
Bottom line, I see that religion helps people and there are those who find joy and a peaceful life in their religion, but I strongly urge you to consider that maybe it’s not so much the religious message that helps, but the fact that we can be apart of one. Having that sense of belonging that one can feel when involved in a church is a sense of belonging that we could extend worldwide if we weren’t limited to the confines of our different religious messages.
Get hip to the fact that whatever you believe in, there is someone somewhere who feels just as strong if not stronger for their beliefs. It’s not a matter of you being right and them being wrong, but more like you’re both right and you’re both wrong. All you have to do is remove religion from the equation to see that.
kylecastellani 
November 24th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
I’ve always felt the same way about religion and spirituality being separate (and don’t get me started about ethics…)
I don’t think that we should give up religion altogether, though. More like be comfortable enough to step outside of our own subscribed faiths. I’ve learned so much about my own Christianity by looking into Buddhism, Hinduism, and even atheism. Each faith or lack thereof has a paradigm that can’t quite be replicated in others, and we’d be giving up a lot of learning moments if we were to give them up altogether.
Thanks for the great post.
November 24th, 2011 at 10:31 pm
Yea I wouldn’t wanna start a book burning and wipe all memory of religion off the face of the earth, but more like keep them all in their proper contexts as having messages and knowledge to offer while keeping in mind that they were written during times when the countries/world was very different. It would be the equivalent of us learning in schools today about Greek mythology and appreciating the history and messages in it’s stories while at the same time acknowledging that they’re just stories. I have definitely taken some very powerful messages from different religions and even have applied those messages to my life, but I guess I’m at a place right now where I don’t have any real loyalty toward one or the other. At any rate, thanks for reading dude and I’m glad you liked it 🙂
November 27th, 2011 at 10:18 pm
Pretty spot on man. Religion was man’s first, best attempt at science, healthcare, philosophy. It had its place but that time is over. Anyone can believe in a supernatural being, spirtuality, God, or (fill in the blank) but the problems arise when someone says they know there is a God or (fill in the blank). They have crossed into a fantasy when they say they know there is a God, they know what he says and they know how to reach him. No one can prove there is no God, but conversely, no one can prove there is a God – or provide any credible evidence there is. Anyone who says otherwise has a long road ahead of them.
Today, religion acts as a hurdle to human advancement. It ends the ongoing conversation on human morality. If God dictates morality why discuss it or investigate it? It makes slaves of people, whether they consciously recognize it or not. There is an all-seeing, all-powerful God that constantly judges your every thought and dictates your life. This is exceptionally damaging for people, heaping lifetimes of guilt and second-guessing onto the backs of believers. It mocks science. Science has brought millions out of poverty and made human life exceedingly better in nearly every way. Science seeks the self-analysis and cross-examination of its tenets, the exact opposite of religion (how can you question a book God wrote?). Religion vehemently opposes scientific discoveries that conflict with its teachings. Evolution was hocus-pocus until the church realized it was all just part of God’s plan. The Catholic church found condoms to be the devil’s instrument and opposed their use – resulting in uncontrolled birth rates and an ever-growing population of women in poverty. Empower women (including birth control) and poverty dropps. Recently the church realized they must have got it wrong and God doesn’t think condoms are so bad.
The list can go on and on.
Religion, for many, answers the cosmic question of why we are here. It is for this reason so many can write over the glaring inconsistency inherent in religion. It can be crippling to think we are purposeless masses of material that die. And that’s it. As crippling as this may be, I find it much more fulfilling than a mythical, divine plan put into place by a cosmic dictator.
You should check out Christopher Hitchens. YouTube is littered with videos of his debates. He can get a bit combative but he is almost next none in his articulate intelligence.
November 28th, 2011 at 12:13 pm
I needed a lot of time to come to terms with leaving the church. making the transition from life revolving around the bible and it’s message to suddenly trying to find my own message was like a culture shock. I swear there were times where I wished I could believe again, not because I felt god plucking my heart strings, but because I was terrified of what I was gonna find if anything to fill the void it left!
There’s a quote that goes something like, “science asks a question and then searches for clues to find the answer, while religion has an answer and then asks questions.”
I’m not mad at religion, I just wish people would ask more questions. Doesn’t something you’re going to devote your life to deserve a little research?