My "Confession"

 Ever since I renounced my faith, in December of 2019, I've had a growing bitterness toward Christianity. I'm sure some of my social media friends and followers have noticed my blunt, and sometimes vulgar, attacks on Christianity. Many have written so-called "confessions" as ways to explain their religious journey. These are usually written in old age or during a time of fatal illness. I'm neither old nor, to my knowledge, fatally ill. My confession, religious Odyssey, or whatever you wish to call it comes at no time when such a thing would be expected. It was inspired by nothing more than the mere thought about confessions of such people as Tolstoy and Saint Augustine. Regardless, I'm writing it. Given my young age of 29 and 30 years (as this was written over the course of roughly a year), I likely have more time to grow in my beliefs. If such a thing happens, it's fine. I may add it to this, wherever it is that this writing ends up. This is merely a rant about my religious history, views, and other such things.

It should be noted, early on, that I hold no bitterness toward my parents for raising me in their faith. With that said, I should begin there. It's where it all began. My parents raised me as a Missionary Baptist. We went to church every Sunday morning and Sunday night. In my teen years, we even went every Wednesday night. In the summer, Vacation Bible School would be held. I'd attend at my church and sometimes at the church that bordered my family's land.

When I was 9 or 10 years old, I attended a Revival sermon and felt an overpowering emotion that made me think that the Holy Spirit had rushed into me to inspire me to accept Jesus as my lord and savior. (For those who aren't aware, Revival is where a guest pastor does sermons at your church every night of the week, in an attempt rally the congregation in the name of Jesus. At least that's how we did it. Others may do it another way. I neither know nor care.) After getting "saved" I was soon sat down with our pastor so that he could talk to me and make sure I understood salvation and what I was dedicating my heart and soul to. He wouldn't baptize me unless I assured him that I was ready. Soon after, I was baptized.

I didn't truly understand the faith. I merely understood what I was taught. I didn't study anything outside of the normal stuff. I was basically a sheep and that's what the church wanted. My most outrageous view was that it's okay to wear shorts to church. As strange as it may sound, that put myself at odds with the new pastor who came in a few years later. He basically believed in a church dress code. This was Tennessee. The summers are hot and humid. This kind of thinking caused my family to search for a new church.

The church we found was lead by the man who preached the sermon at which I found my alleged salvation. To call him eccentric would be an understatement. I got along with him more than I did with the other kids at church. I was extremely overbearing, so I can't exactly blame them. My social skills weren't just lacking. They were absent. I tried too hard to be friends with them. I digress. The preacher loved to goof around. So, one Sunday I jokingly pretended to jump him when he was rounding the corner in the church. He was a big goof, so I assumed he'd laugh. It wasn't unlike something we'd done before. We'll, this time was different. He snapped and was like "this is why you don't have any friends." That wouldn't be the only time someone from that church would tell me something along those lines, but I'll get to that later.

That night, he offered to shake my hand but I refused. It hadn't even been 12 hours since he said that to me. I was a kid. Naturally I wasn't ready to shake hands with him. As he walked away, he apparently called me a big baby. Luckily, I didn't know that until my parents had got me and my brothers up to leave. Those words trigger rage in me because of a bully I once had, but that's for a different time. He sat down with me, my family, and the deacons at some point in the week and we more or less made up. Thankfully, he'd be leaving the church to start his own church within the next few years. Unfortunately, his replacement wasn't particularly my cup of tea.

His replacement was a great pastor but a horrible preacher. By that, I mean that he visited sick members of the congregation and stuff like that. He showed good will toward them. He sucked at preaching, though. His morning sermons were often just a rehash of the Sunday School lesson my dad had just taught. (Yeah. My dad was a Sunday School teacher. That's not really relevant to anything other than this exact thing.) His night sermons would mostly be about how America needs to get back to God. Oddly enough, he would often say that if he started talking about politics in his sermons, then to pull him down from the pulpit. I'd have done so, but that would have landed me in some big trouble with the church. I was already disliked enough. This could have ended up causing me to leave the church forever, and that would be many years too early, since I had a lot of growing to do before my absolute dissent.

He didn't believe that you could be a Christian and a Democrat. He regularly made that clear. I was a conservative Democrat. He wasn't particularly fond of that. We didn't get in each other's faces, but we would make snide remarks at each other. People like him were ubiquitous in that church. This is one thing that drove a wedge between me and most of those people. That included most of the youth and youth leaders. (Years later, one of those youth leaders would tell me that nobody likes me, after I confronted her and a cousin of mine, on Facebook, about their insane remarks about Barack Obama. I don't remember exactly what they said about him, but I know it had something to do with their strange idea that he was the anti-Christ.)

They didn't exactly like people who were different or thought for their selves. I was different and starting to think for myself. There were numerous times when I was at odds with people at that church for silly things. I remember a time when I was reading some scripture in our Wednesday night boys youth Bible study. It was the King James version, so I put on a British accent. The teacher told me to read it normally or else he'd go get my dad. He was so annoyed that I read it with a British accent that he would rather me be taken out of the classroom than to stay and discuss the Bible.

During this time, I was in the middle of their beloved youth indoctrination. Every year, we'd go to a weekend of speeches and concerts called the Youth Evangelism Conference. They wanted to rally teens and save their souls. Throw an electric guitar and some drums under Christian lyrics and get a motivational speaker, and you've got yourself a weekend of indoctrination! It worked, too. I've seen many people go there and find their supposed salvation.

It was also during this time that I was introduced to Young Earth Creationism. I was already a firm creationist, but Young Earth Creationism took it to another level. I was taught that the Bible proves that the Earth is less than 6000 years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth with mankind. I'm not joking. I believed this nonsense for years. I firmly believed that leviathan and behemoth were dinosaurs who Job personally saw in the Old Testament. I firmly believed that God created the earth in 6 24 hour days and rested on the 7th day. I wasn't introduced to the idea that anything in the Bible could be allegory unless explicitly stated as allegory (such as the various parables.)

When I was mere weeks away from turning 15 years old, I joined with many other people from the local Baptist administration and went to West Virginia for a week-long mission trip. Our mission was to indoctrinate children via Vacation Bible School. Some who were with us would work on constructing things for the community, but the vast majority of us were there for the children. We wanted to save their souls. The locals didn't seem all that welcoming. For years, I thought it was because we were outsiders. It never occurred to me that it had something to do with our purpose of being there.

I won't go into the details of it, but I will say that they refused to have me along the next year because of some miscommunications and them just not liking me. Frankly, they shouldn't have allowed teenagers to go on their little trip to indoctrinate children. We were still children, ourselves! 

Things began to change when I was in college. It was slow but it was something. I remember one particular instance of going to church but skipping Sunday School and waiting around for the sermon. I was reading "On Free Choice of the Will" by Saint Augustine, when a deacon approached me and casually warned me to not let philosophy books be a stumbling block in my faith. I was reading a book where a respected Christian argued that free will exists. It's not like I was reading something that was unChristian. The people of that church were of the mind that any philosophy book that isn't the Bible or any other book sanctioned by the Southern Baptist Association is probably bad.

I was around people like that, on campus. I once mentioned the idea that we are technically related to the planet itself because God made Adam from dust. Thus: we have father God and mother nature. That doesn't sound strange for a firm believer in the Biblical creation. For some reason, these people told me not to talk about such things. They were handing out water bottles to students, in the name of the Baptist Collegiate Ministry and they got annoyed at me for that. This was a common occurrence with their kind.

In spring of 2011, I was in my second semester of college and my brother told me that he's gay. That was one of the biggest things to ever influence my faith. It was before various other theological changes, but it began an inner struggle that I would have for years. You see, my brother had been on multiple mission trips. He had spread the word of God in multiple states and even Mexico. To hear that he's gay threw me for a loop. How was I supposed to believe he was still going to Heaven when he dies? I eventually forced myself to believe that homosexuality is a mental illness and you can't be sent to Hell just for having a mental illness. That was my rationale, for years. It wasn't until I read the book "God and the Gay Christian" by Matthew Vines that I became firm in believing that the Bible wasn't actually against homosexuality.

While I was in the confusion that came with my former missionary brother being gay, I began to talk to Calvanists. They never convinced me to believe in predestination, and they weren't pushy about it. They were there for me when the Baptists weren't. This caused me to drop all denominational labels and just identify as a generalized Protestant. I had no doctrine but my own, and all of it fit within the basic ideas of Protestantism. When I became a bigger LGBTQ+ ally (at the time, I didn't accept my bisexuality and so I was merely an ally), I began to identify as a progressive protestant. That was helped by the aforementioned Matthew Vines book.

I don't recall what prompted my inner conflict that would lead from progressive protestant to bitter apostate, but I recall the ideas that went through my head. I couldn't quite figure out how the psychotic God and the loving Jesus could be of the same trinity. The holy spirit didn't really have any sort of personality but God and Jesus were well-defined and very different. I started to float around the idea that maybe God sent Jesus to try to polish up his image, or something like that. I did all sorts of mental gymnastics to work this out in my head. It just so happened that while I was in such a situation, my mother was diagnosed with skin cancer. When someone mentioned that they'll pray for her, I snapped! "Pray to the guy who gave it to her?!" It was then that I knew that I didn't love or trust God anymore.

I didn't stop believing in God. I went through various ideas of who/what God is. At first I considered that Yahweh is God and that the entire Bible is right. Even with the belief in a Biblical hell, I felt it was better to burn than to serve such an evil being as Yahweh. I considered the idea, just as the old Testament suggests, there are other gods but Yahweh cursed them with mortality. Then it occurred to me that God could be something completely different from the raging psychopath the scriptures speak of. What if God is neither good nor evil? What if God is apathetic and sees this all as an experiment? I thought back to the 90s Spider-Man animated series. The Beyonder was a cosmic entity who placed super villains on peaceful worlds, sped time up, and then sent super heroes to fight the villains. He wanted to see who would win in a secret war of good versus evil. He didn't care about the outcome. He just cared about the experiment. Could this be what God is?

I came to the conclusion that God must be one of two things, if it exists at all. It must either be evil or apathetic. It cannot possibly be good. If it is good, then it can't possibly have so much power that it could be seen as anything more than a person, since anyone with that immense power would have to use it to eradicate evil or else they're evil. Thus: if there is a God, it is either evil or apathetic. There are so many things that come about that have nothing to do with free will, and thus changing them wouldn't interfere in our free will. My dog had bone cancer. Nature did that to her. Mankind had nothing to do with it. God curing her would have done nothing to alter the free will he gave us. He did nothing, though. This isn't a case like any health problems I have from my morbid obesity will be. My free will is going to bring those upon me. Removing those would take away from the negative effects of free will. That would be perfectly reasonable to not cure. Things that aren't side effects of the victim's will, however, should be fixed. If God won't fix them, he's either evil or apathetic.

A comic book character by the name of Gorr the god butcher summed up my feelings, in a comic written by Jason Aaron. "In my travels I have learned that there are two kinds of gods. Those who do harm and those who do nothing at all."

Being satisfied with this conclusion, there was still the idea of Jesus Christ. I was left to question his relation to God, and even his historical existence. Was he God's attempt at a PR stunt? Was he divine, at all? Did he even exist? Historians debate his existence. Many believe that he's a compilation of the tales of multiple people and not just one guy. Many believe he was an individual, but was just a man. I decided to err on the side of caution, and lean more toward the idea that he didn't even exist. I dug into articles about the inconsistencies in the gospels and felt pretty firm in my believe that he was no more than a myth.

His existence didn't really matter to me, mind you. My anger fueled my decision to look into it. Even if there was hard evidence that Jesus existed in the exact demigod/avatar way that his followers believe, it wouldn't change my anger and I would still have turned away from him. I'd still seek his father's head on a silver platter.

This anger became a real problem, though. It clouded my judgement of people. I was already a firm believer in the fact that progressive Christianity was a valid form of the faith, and thus not all Christians were bad. My anger caused me to question the judgment of people who turned to God, even if I knew they were generally reasonable people. I began to feel angry when I found out a friend was getting into Christianity, even when it was the progressive variety. (That would eventually change, but we'll get to that later.)

Oddly enough, I began to feel uncomfortable when my dad told me that he no longer believed that the letters of Paul should be in the Bible. I worried that I was hurting someone's faith. I was torn between wanting everyone to hate God, and not wanting people to question something they hold so dear. My views became a sort of paradox, due to my personal struggle to balance compassion and anger.

I began to encourage Christian loved ones to follow a ministry called The New Evangelicals. They're a progressive Christian ministry who are pro-LGBTQ+ and firmly against Christian Nationalism. I figured that if they're going to follow Christianity, they may as well follow the only kind I accept as being okay. That, once again, leaves me stuck in a paradox. So many religious people want me to believe their way but I refuse to. Now, here I am trying to tell them what doctrine of their own faith to follow, while I still see their God as my enemy.

It seems that life was easier when I just blindly accepted things, instead of thinking for myself. There were no paradoxes. It was just service. It raises some questions. Is it better to blindly serve God than to be his bitter adversary? Did I truly free myself from him when I declared war on him or am I giving him more power over me than I had before? At the time of this writing, I have no answers.

Perhaps I'll revisit this, as time goes by. I may add to it by pointing out things that have changed in however long it's been since the writing of this. This was written over the course of about a year, as I mentioned earlier. Changes have been made to make it more accurate. However, any further changes would be specified as later writing and not actually be made as changes to that which has already been written.

I am Lance J. Mealer, and this has been my confession of sorts.