So, initially I had decided to keep this off the internet because I think walking away from religion in itself isn’t a big deal, but over the last few weeks my reasons as to why I walked away have kind of been floating around in the forefront of my mind and I need to write it all out. I apologise for any offence caused, that’s not my intention.

Some of the people reading this are probably readers from my first blog, the Green and Orange Butterfly Project. I didn’t write there often but when I did, it was usually to do with mental illness and I somehow connected Jesus/God to it. My first post was about how I became a Christian after moving in with a young Christian family in the southern seaside town Kaikoura. Cut a long story short, they preached straight of the Bible and I went along to their church meetings on a Wednesday night. Then I eventually started going to actual church on a Sunday and was captivated by how happy everyone looked — something I so desperately wanted. So, I decided to walk their walk.

After a series of coincidences I decided that Jesus was God, and that our God is the God in the Holy Bible. How exactly I was drawn to that conclusion, I can’t remember. But I do remember that I had prayed for something to happen that would be too much of a coincidence, to be considered a coincidence. Then a friend who needed a job within a two-week time-frame, got a job in exactly two weeks since we spoke on the phone about it. That, according to my then-24 year old self, was the Holy coincidence.

I remember the “fire” I felt after that moment, actually. It was intense. I didn’t know much about the Bible back then but all I wanted to do was go out and preach the gospel; I’m surprised I didn’t lose that many friends, because I did become a little bit of an extremist for a while.

But the fire was short-lived. I no longer felt “the presence of the Holy Spirit”, and from that point on everything was an uphill battle. Something in me just didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t pin-point what exactly it was. Now, when I look back it was that my Christian faith was based on the people that went to the same church. Let me explain:

When I first arrived in Kaikoura I was somewhat of a broken spirit. I suffered with depression and horrible anxiety that left me shaking and stuttering when I first met people. I always wore a hoodie, no matter the weather, so that I could hide myself under the hood and with the long sleeves I never had to show my self harm scars.

Social rejection in my youth left me an anxious adult that barely knew how to make friends. I did have some friends before the move to Kaikoura, but not many. So when I walked into the church and was greeted with warm smiles and loving hugs, and people invited me into their homes for dinner or coffee or whatever, I actually felt the love. I was instantly drawn to it and wanted to be around all of them all the time. I think that whole first year (2015) I went to dinner to someone’s house at least twice a week, and met up with probably five others for coffee, lunch, even breakfast. If I wasn’t working or being a hermit, I was with someone from church. Even my flatmates at the time made comments about how many people I was hanging out with.

But as time went on, the new-girl atheist-turned-christian hype died down. People who I would usually hang out with at least once or twice a week, had become too busy to catch up. I’m not feeling sorry for myself here, I know that people do get busy — but I couldn’t help but notice a recurring theme. New people would arrive in the church, and they’d be inundated with people wanting to hang out with them. I’m just going to be honest here, I felt like they had waited until I was “officially saved”, and then it was on to the next person.

These people are still great people, they do a lot for the community and for people in need around the world. But I couldn’t help but miss what they had given me. I arrived as a broken and rejected person, they fed me what I had always craved and then it felt like it was gone once they figured I was staying. That is such a harsh sentence and I’ve re-written it so many times to try soften the blow, but that is honestly how I felt/feel. Not all of the people made me feel this way, there are a bunch that I still keep in close contact with. But I definitely began to feel more like an outsider again toward the end of my first year in Kaikoura.

Once this ball started rolling it became harder and harder to keep hold of the faith in God on my own. I didn’t have that constant support network behind me telling me what certain scriptures meant and who God is, so when I was “left” to figure out shit on my own, that’s when I started questioning everything. Don’t get me wrong, I fought long and hard for over a year to keep believing in it, because I really wanted there to be a loving God/father at the end of my life, waiting for me to enter through the gates of eternal paradise. It’s not that I didn’t have a support network around me at all, it’s more that it wasn’t as strong as it initially was and I felt like people were become impatient with my constant questions.

Prior to Christianity, I was heavily involved in the pro-gay marriage and LGBTQ+ rights movement, I supported it long before realising that I am myself bisexual, which was around age 15. My stance with gay marriage and equal human rights never lifted, they were only oppressed by religion. I would read cases of transgender teenagers stuck in Christian homes, and were being bullied by their Bible bashing parents. I would want to reach out to them and tell them that’s not right, that God still loves them even if they’re transgender or gay or lesbian or whatever. Sometimes I did reach out to these people, and sometimes when I did I discovered I was too late because they’d already committed suicide.

The frustration I felt towards the religious oppression grew bigger. I would ask these questions to the church leaders and pastors. “What is so wrong with being gay?” I was answered with either: “We just have to trust in God and know that he is right,” or, “The Bible says homosexuality is an abomination, we must respect that.”

Those answers just weren’t enough for me, but still I carried on, praying and reading the Bible. But try as I did, no matter how hard I prayed and how patient I was in waiting for those answers, I never heard a voice back that gave me an answer. I looked around for those answers in this world, but do you know what I saw?

Rape;

Child poverty;

War;

Famine;

Homelessness;

Suicide;

Corruption;

Death;

Religious hypocrisy (I’m looking at you, Donald Trump).

The whole time I was fighting to believe in this one religion, the other side of me couldn’t ignore what’s actually going on in the world. These things are ACTUALLY happening, you can’t ignore them. I scrolled through Facebook a couple of days ago to see what my friends and family were up to, only to find a video of small children struggling to breath because of the chemical attacks in Syria. How awful was that video? That small child, the same age as my beautiful niece, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, gasping desperately for air before she died slowly and painfully. She was no older than three.

About a month ago I was sitting outside my classroom engaged in friendly conversation when a classmate mentioned he’s transgender. I instantly had a flashback to the time when I was scrolling through Reddit and I came across an article about a transgender teenager that had killed herself because her Christian parents were constantly belittling and bullying her, demanding she give her life to Christ so he could ‘fix’ her. Her parents took her phone, her laptop, stopped her from seeing her friends, and constantly prayed over this child to be made normal. That girl killed herself. She was 17.

I couldn’t help but wonder with these two examples out of the many I could give, what loving and forgiving God, father, would stand by and watch his daughters be raped? Or allow his sons to be born if he knew that they would transition to other genders, and be heinously ridiculed and sometimes murdered for it? Would God sit back and allow his own beautiful creation to rot away in the very hell it created itself? What about those little babies in Syria right now, struggling to breathe or already dead? What did they do to deserve this? Nothing. But I can’t just accept that I need to just “trust God and know that he’s right” with that last one.

I remember the exact moment I realised the Holy Bible and Christianity are subjected only to personal interpretation; meaning I will read a scripture one way and you’ll read it another, then we both walk away with our own interpretations. It happened when I mentioned to a mentor-type figure that suicide would lead to hell. Her response was that it wouldn’t lead to hell because God is forgiving, and also she didn’t want to ‘believe’ her friend that had committed suicide in past was in hell.

I agree that hell, from the biblical descriptions that I’ve read, sounds like a pretty horrible place. It’s a place that I don’t really like to think about my loved ones going to, especially for something like not believing in Jesus. But that’s exactly why her response struck me. If we get to pick and choose which parts of the Bible we want to believe in, doesn’t that just invalidate the entirety of the Bible? She didn’t want to believe that a friend was in hell, so then she shut me down in my interpretation. Which was that suicide is the act of killing oneself upon giving in to the idea that all hope is lost. To lose hope, and act accordingly, is to deny Jesus. To deny Jesus is to deny the father. And there is only one way to the father, right? And if when you die you don’t go to the father, where do you go?

I have heard Christians argue why it is and why it isn’t okay to have sex before marriage, despite what it says about it in the Bible. Same with smoking, doing drugs, drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, or even judging someone else. I’m not trying to call anyone out here, I smoked weed throughout my Christian phase and I was absolutely able to justify it at the time. But that’s my point: we can justify our actions with our Bibles, if we really want to. Personal interpretation of the scriptures in any religious text is not the truth; it is simply reading a text and allowing certain aspects of it to resonate with you in whichever way pleases you.

When you have a bunch of different types of people all hearing from the same God, it’s not a surprise that God is telling them different things that may conflict with each other. I’ve seen this happen; it happens all the time. This is why there are so many different branches or denominations that come under the Christianity tree, and they all think they’re all right and everyone else just got it wrong. Christianity isn’t the only major religion to do this, all major religions have their groups of people that interpret their religious texts in their ways while another group do something slightly different.

So if everyone has their own story and their own interpretations, how do you know which one is the truth? Kind of reminds me a lot of my early Christian days when I actually laughed at science (cringe) because it’s ever-changing and if it’s ever-changing with groups of scientists arguing with one another, how do you know it’s the truth? Sounds awfully a lot like religion. I think maybe it is then safe to say that we don’t know exactly where we came from or where we are going. Let’s just focus on the middle area and try to get along in the process.

I feel like now is a good time to point out that some of my favourite people in the world are Christians, and they’ll always be my favourites. But on the other hand, some of my favourite people in the world are atheists. Being religious or non religious doesn’t make you a good person, it’s what you do that counts. I’ll never forget my Kaikourians that took me in as one of their own. I feel like I’ve covered the main points I wanted to make about the people/interpretation side of why I walked away from Christianity, now I’ll go into the flaws of the Bible.

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. (John 3:16-18 NIV)

I would say that this scripture is the foundation of Christianity’s pillars. Even people who aren’t Christian have usually heard of this scripture. My problem with it is that horrible word “condemned”. Let’s have a look at the definition of that word:

sentence (someone) to a particular punishment, especially death. express complete disapproval of; censure.

So basically what this scripture is saying is that without Christ, you’ll be going to hell. But the scripture also says “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This confuses me, because what that actually means is that it doesn’t matter which walk of life you have come from, if you turn to Christ, you’ll be eternally saved and off to paradise with Jesus for you.

So you could be a child rapist, having raped and maybe even murdered 12 children. If you turn around and accept Christ, you’ll escape hell. But then for someone like my mum, who is amazing and one of the loveliest people I know, without Christ, she’ll go to hell. I have a huge problem with this. Didn’t Jesus say it would be better for you to tie a rock around your neck and throw yourself into the sea, than to hurt a child? Yet a child rapist has a shot at eternal paradise, while my mum is threatened with eternal damnation, because she hasn’t accepted Christ, in spite of the fact she’s never raped a child. Interesting, but completely flawed.

Another issue for me right now is the book of Exodus, which just happens to be my favourite Old Testament book. It’s the story of Moses rising up against the Pharaoh, and leading his people out of Egypt. It’s an incredible story and I still think that whole book is pretty badass, but then it’s not without its plot-holes. Since I started my creative writing course, I’ve learned to think critically about a piece of work and I’m beginning to pick up on plot-holes faster. I’ve since picked up on the biggest flaw in my favourite biblical book.

Exodus is such a long story so I’ll try to keep this summary short: Moses encounters God, Yahweh, on the mountain. He tells Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and into Canaan, the promised land. Moses then tries to convince the Pharaoh to let God’s people go, which he “fails” at. God then sends 10 plagues across Egypt. The plagues were: Turning the water into blood; Frog invasion; Lice; Wild animals or creatures that harmed people and livestock; Death of livestock; Boils; Thunderstorms and hail; Swarms of locusts; Darkness that lasted three days; and last but certainly not least: the death of all first born sons.

Throughout these plagues Moses still tried to convince the Pharaoh to let the people go, to which he repeatedly refused. Why? Because God had hardened his heart so that he wouldn’t. I can’t believe it took me two and a half years to realise that God destroyed the land (he created) and the people (he also created) with 10 horrific plagues (including the death of all first born sons, including babies) because the Pharaoh wouldn’t do something, because God wouldn’t let him do it! And then when I step back and I think about these plagues, is God also causing all the commotion that’s happening in the world today? Because like I mentioned earlier in the post, all those little children dying from the chemical attacks. God may not have directly dropped bombs himself, but shit he sure did make an entire nation to suffer at his own hands with terrible plagues, why wouldn’t he allow children to suffer now?

I also have a problem with the straight-up misogyny in the Bible. I’m going to say here that I really don’t give a shit that at the end of the Bible it says men should treat their wives with love, because that’s not what it depicts throughout the rest of it. The misogyny starts with the first book: Genesis. Women in the Bible are the property of their husbands. Even at the beginning of the books with the lists of the family lines, no women are mentioned. Example: in Genesis when Noah has built his ark, we know that eight people jump on board. We know the names of Noah and his sons, but the women are just kind of there to reproduce the population and aren’t mentioned. Not even Noah’s wife.

Another example in the Old Testament, is that a girl or woman raped should marry her rapist, but only if the rapist has the fee to pay for the hand in marriage. (Deuteronomy 22:28–29) Excuse me? Are you serious? I suppose she also had to just lie down and accept being raped? Maybe even wash him afterwards so he would be clean when he pays her father? Can you even call it rape, since women are so obviously just objects in the eyes of God? Well actually in some religions, raped women are stoned to death so I suppose this isn’t so bad in comparison. (sarcasm)

This is also another classic example. In the New Testament, 1 Timothy 2:9-15

I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

Ahem… I’m not sure where to begin with this one, everything about it is just so wrong. Maybe I should just stay quiet and in full submission. Screw that. I’m an intelligent being with a voice, and I’m going to exercise my human right to use both. First of all, Paul (dude writing to Timothy), I’ll dress however I damn well want, and women back in your time should have been able to dress however they wanted. But they couldn’t, could they? Because YOU and your God oppressed them.

Secondly, I love the fact that a woman was the first to be deceived keeps being brought up, yet no one mentions how God also created the deceiver (and no one mentions that Adam also was deceived). If he’s all knowing and all powerful like people say he is, then he would have foreseen what was going to happen. God actually kicked the serpent out of heaven and sent him to Earth (which was the Garden of Eden), knowing exactly what was going to happen. Yet God decided that this was the best course of action and he was going to continuously punish women for it.

In fact actually, the biggest plot-hole in Christianity is that God is all knowing, and saw the events that would play out until the end of time. Yet, he still went ahead with this shit? Why the heck would he even create Satan, if he knew Satan was going to destroy it all anyway? Why would he create me, with my own intelligence and life, if he knew that I was going to go to hell? In fact, if you look at someone like Judas, he was created purely to go to hell. That doesn’t sound like the act of a loving God or father to me.

I also personally don’t want children, but as for the women who can’t have children, does that mean that they can’t be saved? Because Paul wrote that women would be saved through childbearing, so sorry ladies who can’t have children, even adopting kids won’t save you, not even if you’re faithful, loving and holy, apparently.

I’m already at 3,930 words with this post and I’m starting to get angry just thinking about it, so I think I should stop here. But to summarize how I feel:

I’m tired of the misogyny and trying defend/deny it. I’m tired of basing faith on people, when I could just be friends with those people and still continue to live my life how I want to live it. I don’t want to give up my life for some great unknown, when it won’t answer my prayers or questions; why should I trust the judgement of something that doesn’t respond to the most basic requests? I can’t ignore the biblical plot-holes anymore, I know they were written by men which in a sense makes it even worse to try to believe in it.

To simplify: I don’t believe that God is Yahweh or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. I believe that God is just simply existence, and that love is love and there is nothing wrong with being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, pansexual, polysexual or any other kind of sexual.

Since walking away from Christianity I have been the happiest I have been in a while. Even the depression is at bay. I think it’s because I’m not constantly fighting against the current. I’ve always had these values and beliefs within me that I wasn’t necessarily raised to believe in, they were just always there. But they never fit with Christianity. It was like a tug-o-war, which side was going to win? Me or Christianity? I’ve chosen a much easier path to walk in, and hopefully I’ll still keep the close friendships I have made because of the Christian lifestyle. But that life just isn’t for me anymore.