Deprogramming Jessica

You may be wondering, why not just take on a more liberal version of Christianity? Why abandon it completely? There are all kinds of progressive denominations nowadays. So why not just do that? I tried. For years.  I tried reconciling everything I wanted the Bible to be with what it really says. I argued with other Christians and accused them of taking things out of context to support their hateful and intolerant narrative. I ignored the icky parts of the Bible and only embraced the love-one-another parts. I had decided that I was right in my interpretation of the Bible and those condemning people to hell were just bigots. They weren't really Christians, they were using the Bible to make themselves superior. I have since learned that this is a logical fallacy. It's the No True Scotsman fallacy. What I figured out is that in actuality, they're not wrong about anything. The stuff they are pointing out as immoral and how they are using the Bible to judge others; it's not a...

Early this morning my husband rolled over and he said, "You are the prettiest and nicest girl in the whole world."  I said thank you.  He said, "It's true." I said, "Even the nice part?"  He said yes. Followed by, "Nobody wants someone who just says yes, master to everything. Well, except on the weekends."  I chuckled.  I have been challenging him a lot in the last year. He and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum on some topics and we don't always communicate effectively or understand one another very well. I used to be more of a yes, master, wife. I rarely challenged him or disagreed.  He has made some comments in the last couple of years about how little we have in common. I am such a chameleon, he rarely knows what's going on in my head or how to keep up with me. There have been times lately when I have wondered if he ever felt like we were too different or I had changed too much and wasn't who he fell in love with, anymore....

Up until this time last year I had built my entire identity and sense of self worth around people liking me. I wasn't fully aware that this was the case, yet I actively positioned myself and made decisions (including communication style) based on what I thought would win people over. My self esteem came directly from my ability to make myself seen as always reliable, friendly and selfless. The hardest pill to swallow for me was when I encountered someone who no matter how hard I worked, I could not win them over or get them to like me. It felt like a personal attack. When I steeped back and looked at it, I realized that I used people's like for me and their trust in me as leverage to position myself how I wanted and get where I wanted in my career and in certain circles. I'm not sure if that would be true manipulation, since I had earned the respect, but when I think about it I do feel a little icky. As I maneuvered 2020 and the isolation it brought with it, I had a lot of ...

Today I have been considering the topic of sin. In Christianity, the moral authority is based around the concept of sin. I looked up the definition and it says, "An immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law. A sin in the eyes of God." The entire goal of a Christian is to avoid sin. Sins are sins because they are acts of wrongdoing against God. Sins are not wrong because they may hurt another person, they are wrong because God said not to do it.  So much emphasis is placed on avoiding sin and sinful behavior and Christians feel compelled to try and correct (out of love) and condemn people who are committing or living in sin, according to the Bible. This act of condemnation is curious when you take into account that the entire purpose of the alleged resurrection of Jesus was to wash away the sins and transgressions of the world. Or wait, maybe they meant just of Christians? Jury is out on that one... Anyway, I was thinking about the correlation between sin...

I have some family members who are deep into the QANON conspiracy theory. Well, a couple that are ear deep in and a couple that are toe deep in. My sister in law is totally consumed by it and it has caused her to cut ties with other members of the family (me and my family and my parents) over it. She sees this in such a way that anyone who doesn't believe what she does (the propaganda), is a blind sheep for which there is no help. She is absolutely 100% convinced that the conspiracy theories and the prophecies will come true. There is no convincing her otherwise and if you try she will just tell herself (and you) that YOU are the one that is brainwashed and YOU are the one who is wrong.  That got me thinking. This is the same exact way a religious person (especially Abrahamic) approaches anyone who questions their God, religious texts or belief structure. They are just as vitriolic, just as temperamental, just as protective and just as unwilling to explore other possibilities....

The idea of the will of God has got to be one of the most confusing parts about Christianity. Seriously. It is one of the things that always bugged me when I was a Christian and it is one of those things I worked very hard to reconcile. This idea of God's will.  Predeterminism. There's this whole narrative around everything being predetermined and part of God's divine plan. We are taught that nothing happens that isn't a part of God's plan. We are taught that everything happens for a reason. EVERYTHING. This raises some interesting questions one of which is, why do we pray? What good does it do to pray if the decision has already been made about what is going to happen? If God changed his plan according to humans simply requesting that he do so, then his plan isn't divine and everything doesn't happen for a reason. If God changes his plan, it changes the eventual outcome. See, the thing about predeterminism is, that in order for prophecies to be fulfilled, e...

Over the last twenty years I have witnessed dozens of women reach the end of their ropes and file for divorce around or just after turning 40. As I watched it happen to my mother's friends when I was a teenager she warned me that something happens to a woman when she turns forty. She didn't know if it was a shift in hormones or what, but for whatever reason, a lot of women reach the point where they leave their long term relationships at that time. She cautioned me to be on the ready, should I have some of those feelings when I reached that age. Where I come from it was not uncommon for most women to be married by their early 20's up until the early 2000's. I supposed that it did stand to reason that if you hit the 20 year mark and things were still toxic, you might at that point decide to jump ship. It made sense. Turning forty is kind of a big deal and a lot of people go through something, want to turn over a new leaf, etc. So, it did make sense that they would choose...

My resolution for 2021 is a goal to live a more authentic life. This is to build upon all of the changes and the growth 2020 brought me. My goal for 2020 was to overcome some of the anxiety I carried. I ended up doing that through some tough shadow work and what that revealed about me. Once I began addressing those issues I was able to let go of a lot of the stress I carried. It was a pretty successful period of growth. So, I wanted to keep pushing forward in 2021 by living based on what I was able to overcome.  So, what does it mean to live a more authentic life? What does this mean specifically? Well, the main thing I am having to get past is making all of my decisions and living according to the expectations of other people. I have uncovered that a lot of the reasons for this have actually been related to ego and are out of fear of the possible consequences from people who are displeased by my failure to meet their expectation. I have always lived a very curated existence as far...

There was an existential crisis that took a year, of slowly and completely letting go of God and Christianity. It is now obvious to me that my non-belief was a truth that I struggled with for many years and I was just in denial because of what I was taught those thoughts meant about me. I held onto things WAY LONGER than I should have out of the fear of being bad, being seen as bad or disappointing others. I was expecting there to be a major identity crisis as there can be a grief period and people who leave the faith can go through a period of anger and feel very lost. I have felt a little lost at times, I'll admit. But I have not felt the anger I expected to feel. Instead I feel relieved. I think it's because I had stopped believing years ago, I just needed to admit it to myself and let go. The bonds of religion are chains I carried all on my own. I was the one who had to decide to put them down.  I do continually have thoughts and realizations as this transformation continue...

One thing I am noticing as I get further and further into this journey to freedom from Christianity is that when you finally stop looking at the world and your life through the God and Jesus lens, it really changes how you see everything in the world. I mean, EVERYTHING. I am finding myself reevaluating everything I used to think, every opinion I have ever held, every feeling and way of reasoning I used to experience. It's wild! I didn't even realize how much religion was knit into the fiber of my psyche. It's interesting and it feels like rediscovering the world.  When the Bible is no longer a measuring stick and when I no longer have to try and do mental gymnastics to reconcile the Bible with what I know to be true, everything looks so different. Song lyrics make sense in different ways. Things that I avoided out of fear of being judged I am researching and delving into. It's really exciting and very interesting. I feel allowed to learn things in a way I haven't b...

As a Christian I had been taught that anyone who turned away from God willingly and especially those who called themselves that dirty Atheist word were doing so simply because they were choosing to live a worldly life where they could be as immoral as they wanted and that these people were not only immoral but they were literally being willingly defiant of God. As a Christian you are taught that Atheist and non-believers are really bad people. They are actively choosing sin over God.  Being fed that narrative growing up and from the pulpit as an adult it can cause a person to put together some preconceived notions about Atheism and what it means. When I was a Christian I thought of Atheists as smug, stubborn, arrogant, selfish people who wanted to be able to live contrary to morality and who openly rejected God for their own selfish reasons. Boy, was I wrong. Turns out I have bene wrong about a lot of stuff. To a Christian it is difficult to think of a more arrogant person than an ...

I was listening to a lecture by Bart Ehrman this morning about whether or not Jesus was God and I had an epiphany. I see a very direct connection between the Bible and the Q-Anon conspiracy theories circling around today and it has everything to do with prophecy.  He was talking about whether or not historical Jesus believed he was God, whether or not we can reasonably believe he said he was God or if, just maybe, that part was added later. Very interesting lecture. He was focusing on the gospels and spent a lot of time focusing on the book of John.  So, basically Bible scholars agree that the evidence suggests Mark was probably written first (it's the most vague) and was probably written 50 or so years after Jesus died. Matthew and Luke were probably written 60 years out and were written after Mark. John was written last, 70 or so years after Jesus died. This is interesting because it means none of the gospels were written by eye witnesses and we know they were written anonym...

This was one of the first things I saw after opening my eyes this morning. It was shared by a Facebook friend. It is a metaphor correlating the ark to a relationship with Jesus and it is awful. It is so beyond disturbing. It's not something I would have paid much mind to a few years ago, but now I look at that and I immediately feel discomfort. I see how toxic this is. It is even causing me to want to distance myself from the person who shared this. They would not understand my issues with this meme and they would not understand why I would feel the need to separate myself from something they saw not only as a helpful reminder, but the truth.  I am trying not to judge religious people for the sake of them being religious. As long as they are not using their religion to hurt others then there is no reason for me to be bothered one way or another. I am trying really hard not to look down on religious people as if they are idiots or naïve. As a Leo this can be really hard. Right now I...

One of the things that will always be a challenge is my ability to articulate myself properly if or when I am questioned about why I left the faith. I know exactly why, but explaining it to others in a way they can understand will be hard. The main reason being that I am actually (and this will sound nuts) living in a completely different reality from the person who would be doing the asking. Literally living in another reality. It's so freeing! The anger and malice that comes from Christians and is hurled at non-believers comes from fear. Their own fears regarding things they don't want to think about and their fears that the atheist is choosing hell.  I happened upon a clip from the YouTube show Hot Ones where the amazing Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about how we are a part of the universe and why it's special and it was so perfect an explanation. He said, "We have come to define significance as that we are special and everything else isn't. Religions thinking they...

 Here are the main things I learned in 2020 that cemented my decision to let go of religion and the idea of faith. Is God in Charge or is Satan? In an effort to further divide the right from the left, the conservative from the liberal, there has been a narrative coming from the pulpit of many churches that villainized the left and the Democratic party to the point of stating Donald Trump was God and Jesus's chosen leader and that if by chance Biden was to win the election it would and could only mean that Satan had gained control of the country and the United States would be subjected to an evil leader. There are a few issues with their narrative. One point being that we do not know Donald Trump's religious affiliation (if he has one) but we know for a fact that Joe Biden is a practicing Catholic. As in, the man attends mass regularly and does not use a church and Bible as a photo op after tear gassing peaceful demonstrators.  Another issue is the idea that Satan can "take...

I often hear arguments from Christians when confronted with a conversation with an atheist about morality and hope. Basically they will ask the atheist, "Without the Bible for guidance how can you discern right from wrong?" and also, "Living a life without Jesus is living a life without hope. How can you live a life where there is no hope?" First of all I will state that I have asked myself these questions in regards to atheists, though I never had an actual conversation with an atheist at that time. There aren't many atheists in my neck of the woods. There are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics and Christian Reformed. But, I had also been taught that the only place we can gain an understanding of what is right and wring is from the Bible and the laws and that God's laws superseded man's. I was also taught that to live a life without walking with Jesus and accepting him as your personal lord and savior was to live a life without hope. Because to a Christian...

I found this list the other day and I decided to save it. It took me over 30 years to get through the first two stages of this list. I spent the last year on stage three and I flew through stage four in about three weeks time. Now I find myself wallowing a bit in stage five. You know, where everything you thought you knew and everything you used to believe; to cling to, to use as a basis of explaining everything, is gone. Things feel a tad confusing. I feel a little lost and disillusioned. Like I still don't know what everything is, but I am confident I know what everything ISN'T.  So I'm going to sit with that for a bit. 

I have been thinking a lot about how religion gives some people hope who've had none. How it can give people perspective, make them feel loved and a part of something. In one respect, I can see how religion can help bring people out of a dark place, be it addiction, self harm, etc. On the other hand, the thing that appears to be one thing often ends up to be a bait and switch and religion is no different. What if that thing that gives you hope is at its core, disingenuous? It happens to well meaning, good hearted people all the time! Look at MAGA as an example. Otherwise good, well meaning and largely Christian individuals were sucked into a narrative and the need to belong outweighed any downside until it became a cult.  As someone who grew up a believer and who is now an agnostic atheist, I am open to new ways of seeing the world and I am coming to the realization that, at least for me, it had been my faith holding me back all along.  As I was driving to work this morning I ...

While this journey to understand has been a lifelong one, I found that the downtime I had in 2020 allowed for tremendous introspection which allowed me to get to the place I am now. I was thinking back on that this morning and remembering how the process unfolded during the whole year, up to now. The biggest theme of my spiritual life up to this point has been a big chase, for me. I'd had a few experiences where I would say I felt close to God or felt like I was at peace with my spiritual journey. Those were fleeting phases in time and I would find myself in a rut or feeling numb or depressed and then put great effort into trying to get that "connection to God" back again so that I could have peace and love in my spirit again. Such a futile effort, looking outside of ones self for these validations and for a sense of peace. I have learned that it's everywhere and also within.  2020 started out rough for me, emotionally speaking. I had a MAJOR Christmas hangover. It wa...

In church you are taught this notion that, GOD IS LOVE. We are taught that this is the case because he loved mankind SO MUCH that he sacrificed his ONE AND ONLY SON for US so that we could spend eternity with him in heaven. It is DRILLED into our brains that God is the most selfless, caring, creator that can be imagined because he gave his own son's life, for us. How much must a heavenly father love humanity to allow his own son to die for it? Okay, first of all, God made ALL OF THE RULES. The God of the Bible is not the definition of love. This God does not rule by love. He rules by FEAR, plain and simple. And he governs with a real bully mentality of, "Sorry, I can't let you in unless you declare me as the one true God and agree to worship me even though I can totally prove to you that I exist, but instead will leave an archaic book of breadcrumbs for you to try and decipher as proof that I exist. BUT..... if you don't promise to love and worship me, I'm sorry bu...

As I have unpacked mine and my family's traumas from the church and as I have seen the way Christian people act and treat each other and how they weaponize religion; as I have allowed myself to really separate myself from religion and free myself from all it stands for, I have noticed I hold a fair amount of resentment. I hold some hostility as well.  Deep down I have no issues with people exercising their beliefs. I can relate to people who are all-consumed by religion and doing everything they can to live by the rules it lays out. I get it, on some level. But at the same time I am angry. I am frustrated. I am hurt. The one thing I was taught was the truest beacon of light, love and acceptance in the world is, in realty far from any of that.  I feel bamboozled. I feel like I was force fed garbage for decades; taught that it was the only option. I'm angry, even though I understand the motives of my parents (specifically my mother) I also wish she would have had enough backbone...

My daughter is about to turn sixteen and I am constantly blown away at her bravery. She (like most of gen z) knows who she is and she doesn't apologize for being herself. Her comfort in her own skin and her willingness to be open and honest about everything without fear of the opinions of others is inspirational.  She came out as LGBTQ+ at age nine, for example. She wanted to talk about Christianity today and I quickly discovered that she shares many of the same thoughts and opinions that I have. She had been active in church up until a year ago when she was treated so horrifically by other teens in the church who were backed up by adults that she asked not to return. I told her that I supported that decision. Turns out that she had a lot of the same questions I had, but she brought them to the teachers. She was putting people on the spot, a lot! And she eventually got bullied out the door. That really served as a last straw for both of us. She makes no bones about how she feels ab...

Critical thinking. This is a topic that I have put a lot of thought into lately. With all that has gone on in our country, with misinformation, sensationalized political entertainment news, and the functions of social media, it has become clear that there are some major gaps in the average american's ability to think critically about things they encounter.  The thought I have in this regard is that religion is a major contributor to this issue. People are taught to believe things without any evidence, which is a slippery slope, especially if you are dealing with people who are less intelligent.  It is my opinion that Abrahamic religions hold us back as a species. They keep mankind stagnant in this weird limbo of fear. We are taught that the true basis of God and the Bible is love, but the truth is the true basis is fear, plain and simple. People act out, they condemn things, lash out and they discriminate because they are scared of what God might say about whatever thing....

This question and the concept of morality has served as one of the bigger things attached to my need to leave the faith.  The definitions of the term Morality are:  principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. a particular system of values and principles of conduct, especially one held by a specified person or society. the extent to which an action is right or wrong. Christians are taught that morality comes from God and those without God are immoral, empty people.  I can't say that I never questioned this notion. But, I didn't really put much thought into it until recently. I guess I had concluded previously that morality came from God, it was the human definition and interpretation that was the issue. But, when I sat down and really looked at this, like, looked at what the Bible says; this book that is supposed to be the one and only book to answer our questions about life, I started to see some problems.  If morality supp...

Today is a day where I feel confused and my brain feels muddled about stuff. This shows that unlearning something after almost 40 years takes some time and is has its bumps in the road. I have been doing more research, learning about atheism, world history, religious texts and I have been listening to people discuss and debunk religion. The main guy doing all the talking is a former Christian and he has ZERO belief in anything whatsoever, when it comes to "anything else" and his arguments are pretty compelling. That has left me with a few questions for myself that I am trying to answer.  Do I believe in God? If I answered no, does that mean I don't believe in any sort of thing out there that is bigger than us? What do I mean when I say I don't believe in God? If I say I don't believe in God, but still believe in something, how can I justify it? Wouldn't believing in any sort of spirituality just be a different version of the same fake news? What do I "bel...

 I started thinking about when it was that I can recall REALLY starting to question my belief in God and the Bible and a time where I felt like I had seen a sign of there being something else. It didn't take me too long to figure it out a really good example of both of these things and they happened around the same time in my life. In my late 20's to early 30's. My thoughts about these experiences look very differently to me now than they did at the time they occurred. I perceived them within the framework I had at that point. When I look back on them now, they are still pivotal, but I perceive their meaning differently than I did before.  The Big Bad Feeling Because I used to have ZERO ABILITY  to say no when asked to do something, I was roped into teaching a middle school aged Sunday school class. I taught it for three years around the year 2010. At first it was fun, because I enjoy talking to kids and working with kids and this age group especially, are very entertaini...