We often read testimonies of those who have turned to Christ. I've recently received a testimony of someone who has turned away from the church. It is quite long (2,350 word); it makes a number of challenging points. It is written to a long term friend who has remained in the church. I have not edited the personal references but I have changed names of people and places. I know the writer pretty well and can vouch for his honesty.
What do you think of the points he mades? How does the letter make you feel? How would you respond if you had received it?
Hello Jim.
Here
at last is the message you've been after. I gathered my thoughts in a note on
my phone a while ago, and always meant to turn into this message, so here I am.
Sorry for the wait, sorry also for what you will likely feel at reading it, but
here goes.
Please
know one thing before I start, regardless of our different beliefs, I will of
course, always have huge respect for you, your wife and your family. If I ever
bump into any of you again, you/they can expect one almighty hug. Ok so maybe not
you’re Dad (lol) but Rachel, Annie, your good self and your mum Betty for sure!
Well
everything I want to say can be split into two categories, with the first being
far and away the most important. I consider my reasons for leaving Christianity
to be
1)
What I experienced as a person
2)
My opinions and beliefs concerning Christianity in 2013
So
part one then, my experience of Christianity. I don’t know where to start do
I’ll get to the heart of the matter. By the summer of the year 2000 my relationship
with God was a wreck. In fact there was effectively no relationship there.
Several factors had led to this. If I roll back 2 years to summer 1998 I was a
firm believer, but a rather neurotic one. For some reason I could never settle
down comfortably in my relationship with God. I was always paranoid that I
loved my worldly possessions too much and could only envision God and all my
other loves being in conflict.
This
was regardless of the fact that nothing I did was ‘sinful.’ We are not talking
about spending £100 on coke and prossies here; we are talking about a trip to
Oxford Street and blowing the same amount on models of the Starship Enterprise
and some heavy metal albums. So why did I feel this way? Who knows? It may have
been a reflection of anxieties within myself, but I certainly could never get
away from the fact that God never seemed to give me a straight answer on this,
so during Lent one year I lent the whole lot out. I stripped all posters from
my walls and gave away all my music, sci-fi stuff, furthermore I didn’t eat any
chocolate or sugary stuff, so I could totally put God first.
It
didn’t resolve my issues however and eventually I sold all my sci-fi toys, and
threw out various heavy metal records in case God found them offensive. Christianity
soon became a very negative force in my life. I remember lamenting once that I
felt emotionally exhausted and drained. Meetings with mature Christians didn’t
help long term. I then had a relationship with a Christian girl, which ended in
heartbreak. After that I resolved to give it my all. I prayed and fasted often.
I threw out literally any album that could have offended God. Off they went
into the bins of Sunnyside primary school, my complete Iron Maiden back catalogue,
loads of records by Motley Crue and various bands that by all but the tallest
stretch of the imagination were completely harmless. I read books by Charles
Spurgeon and Tommy Tenney, which were really hard core; all about the death of
the self and things. In efforts to find what God wanted for me, my version of
Christianity ended up being a hybrid of strict Puritanism and passionate
Pentecostalism.
Nothing
was coherent however and Christianity became increasingly dysfunctional. In
short, it was doing my head in. As you can imagine, many Christians fed me the
same lines. “You are trying to get to God! Just do nothing and let him come to
you.” Do you remember Matt Jackson? He
definitely fed me exactly this line. So, I had many still moments in prayer
where I did exactly this and tried doing nothing, just allowing God to come
into my heart. I still felt anxious and miserable, with no discernable
relationship with God.
Truly
Jim, even as I lay completely still and open, God with could not or would not
make some sort of change in my heart to draw it towards him. In the end it was
too much and I threw in the towel. I still believed it was totally true, I just
couldn’t do it anymore so I stopped living a Christian life. It was fascinating
looking back. Still believing, but refusing to live it in any way at all. I
wrote a song about this time, called ‘Burning Sun’ and I must say I still love
the lyrics, which explore the depths of this confused paradox.
Over
time, I came to ask questions, but for the first time, it seemed that I
wouldn’t rule anything out at the start, as I wasn’t working from the
ideological base of gospel Christianity. I was allowing myself to think freely.
So
now we reach the second part, the shift in my opinions now I am no longer a
Christian. Having reached this point of distance from God, I began to ask
fundamental questions, without already believing I knew the answers.
As
an example, take a challenging thought such as: "How do we know
Christianity is the true way and that Jesus was correct when he said; "No
one shall get to the Father save through me?"" Formerly I would have answered
towing the classic Christian line that reads something like: "We just know
because we have faith." However, with no relationship with God to speak
of, I answered for the first time with: "There is no reason to believe
that Christianity is any more likely to be true than any other faith." So,
to cut a long story short, opening my mind to all possibilities has ultimately
led to the following convictions.
1. As I said previously,
I believe Christianity is no more likely to be true than any other faith. The
classic fundamentalist view is that only Christians are saved and therefore
Christianity has a monopoly on salvation, something I find rude and offensive
to those of other faiths/religions. The sincerity of many Muslims, Hindu's,
Sikhs etc. is equal to that of Christians, also their sacred texts are every
bit as sacred to them.
This monopoly on
Salvation is an unpleasant and cruel idea. Are millions upon millions of
faithful truth seekers throughout history condemned? As a belief it’s
abhorrent, as a possible reality it’s a nightmare whether you’re a Christian or
not. I would of course hold the same view of such fundamentalism within Islam,
Judaism, Jehovah‘s Witnesses, or any other faith that excludes all outside of
that faith. This idea goes totally against natural justice and is morally
wrong. Even if this turned out to be the truth, for myself to be sat in hell
with Hitler as well as the Jewish children he exterminated is morally wrong.
Scenarios such as this are a truth that any faith that
holds a monopoly on salvation has to answer to. I used the same scenario in a
question back when I was a Christian; during a Q and A session on a Christian
CYFA camp back when I was a firm believer, probably around 1995. It was
something along the lines of “How can it be right for Hitler to share hell with
the 6million Jews he murdered?” I didn’t get a convincing answer from anyone on
the panel at the time. “I just think we should worry about ourselves.” Said
someone called Wendy.
2. If God is the
eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Lord of all things, then he
should be unchanging should he not? Can a perfect holy being change its mind or
change its character? I would say not, and I imagine most Christians would
agree. However, there have, throughout history been many changes in the
perception of God as there has also been in the Bible.
You don't have to go
back far to find times when it was perfectly ok to do something intolerable
today: to kill in the name of God. Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the
Tudors' burning of Catholics to name but a few. This is both a moral problems
and an intellectual one. It doesn’t make rational sense for human perceptions
of God to change throughout history, when God is supposed to be perfect and
unchanging. It makes far more sense to state that perceptions of him have
changed as ideas and societies have.
Some theologians talk
about God as being ‘omnibenevolent’. This characteristic of God is a relatively
new one. In the Bible God was downright horrid at times. Think about the Great
flood? If a human did that in 2013 you'd lump them in with history's most
notorious fascist dictators, yet when it was written it must have been
perfectly ok for a God to behave in that way.
Leviticus 26 v 27-29
is an outstanding further example. If a God wanted to torture someone in the cruellest
most evil, possible way. What could it be? Torture their family? Make them
watch their children die perhaps? Well the God of the Bible threatens one step
further there, he says he would be quite prepared to starve you so much that
you have to eat your children yourself to stay alive. Lets see what the exact
words of an online bible are... NIV: 27 “‘If in spite of this you still do not
listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will
be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times
over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.
The Good news version agrees: 27 “If after all of this you still continue to
defy me and refuse to obey me, 28 then in my anger I will turn on you and again
make your punishment seven times worse than before. 29 Your hunger will be so
great that you will eat your own children.
When I used to read
these verses as a Christian, I used to justify these lines in all sorts of ways
“That’s just one half of the covenant, the other half is salvation through
Jesus Christ,” or I’d say that what God is really trying to say is:
"Misfortune will befall you, if you make me powerless to help you and
you'll end up having to eats your kids just to stay alive." Oooh I’ve just
remembered, I asked the vicar of St. John’s about this verse back in the day,
and he replied with something like “Well that’s difficult, it certainly shows
God is not to be messed with.” However reading verses like these when free to
question Christianity, I would say the word punish (used in both translations)
says it all - its a direct threat and an utterly horrific one. So go back to
whenever it was written, and clearly it was ok for a God to be like this.
Such a thing couldn't
be published nowadays. If anyone directly condoned the vision of God in this
passage in 2013, it would not be accepted as a true reflection of God by
mainstream Christians. I would contend that these changes tend to undermine the
credibility of Christianity and its God somewhat. Besides, even if Christianity
is true, why on Earth would I want to come back to a God capable of this (Even
if later on he showed his good side and sent his own son to die for us)?
3. For me, it makes
little sense to formulate a worldview based around Christianity. The people of
this world cannot be cleanly split into those who have been born again, and
those who have not. I watched The God channel for 15 minutes or so a few months
ago. Their propaganda maintained that Christianity was one glorious movement; a
mighty army which God was about to use to evangelise the world. It just isn’t
like this. Christianity is no more unified than any political movement; the world
is dominated by economics, poverty, power and so on. It is a world of complete
chaos, of ideas of all kinds, of war, of trade, of politics, of money, of love
and laughter and of cruelty and exploitation. Our world is nuts, and can hardly
be understood with any model at all. That for me includes the Christian worldview.
So in short my position nowadays is as follows:
• I
am agnostic. I believe there is probably more to this Earth than matter and
energy, but I do not believe
•
Regarding hard core fundamentalist Christians, despite my heavy disagreement
with their beliefs, I respect them and their beliefs as pretty much everyone is
entitled to respect. I can barely imagine speaking to even the most militant of
Christians with proper distain, or becoming at all angry when debating this.
•
Regarding liberal Christians – they are my kind of people. People who accept
that other faiths not only are worthy of respect, but that they may also be
communing with the divine in a different way. Christians who support gay
marriage; people who emphasise the kindness and love within Christianity above
all.
Well
I'm sure I could keep on going with various other points but I'll stop there.
You will, of course, not agree with any of my points above but that is because faith is not a matter of the mind but of the heart. That’s why I opened
with the part that I did, my broken, non-existent relationship with God.
Ultimately you and I have completely different beliefs not because of our
different opinions on the Bible etc., but because we have had very different
experiences of God.
Your
relationship with him worked, mine didn’t and on one level at least it really
is that simple! Well I am sorry for sending something you will surely find so
sad, but for reasons I think neither of us can fully explain, we have
ultimately had very different experiences of Christianity. Well, I'm off Jim,
take care matey, and give my best to dear Annie!
With
total respect, your good friend
Rob
