My Deconversion Story
Posted by Soulless | Filed under atheism
I grew up in a very conservative and rural area. For 12 years (1976-1988) that I was in school, 2nd grade till graduation (I failed 6th grade once), I was abused physically, emotionally, and psychologically by the other students which was due in no small part to Christianity. I have been gay all my life, but I came out when I was 22. I was in self-denial of being gay in school but the students knew I was gay before I did. I can’t begin to tell you what it was like to be held captive in school for those hours, 5 days a week where I was kept continuously on the defensive. My guard was always up and I was a nervous child because of it. I was beat on, spit on, kicked, choked, and called every negative epithet in the book. There was hardly a day that went by that something didn’t happen, and I was always waiting for the hammer to fall. The teachers never even attempted to stop any of it and they knew it was happening. I just wanted to be left alone and that’s the one thing that I never got.
My family began attending church when I was in 3rd grade. We went to the Church of God of Prophesy in Madisonville. It was a small Pentecostal Charismatic Church which was very conservative. Most of the people in town were Southern Baptist. I was indoctrinated just like the other kids, and although it was shielded from the children I overheard the story of Sodom and Gomorrah which was being discussed in the adult Sunday school. I was shocked to say the least. My Sunday school teacher was busy telling us about Noah and the animals and ultimately how much Jesus loved the little children of the world while the adults were being told that God hated homosexuality and that he destroyed cities because of it. Deep within me I knew the label “homosexual” applied to me somehow having already been called “fag” and “queer” at school and those names were associated with homosexuality. It took a few years to understand but I knew within me I was gay yet I still couldn’t admit it openly even to myself since it was not something I wanted to be. By the time I was in 5th grade I pretty much accepted the abuse that was happening to me, and it was really just getting started at that point. I acted like I deserved it. I used to let a boy beat my head against a block wall while we waited for the bus in the afternoons almost daily for over a week. He eventually grew tired of it and moved on. I went home every afternoon with a headache. One might ask why I never said anything to my parents. I was going to at first but my father was in the military and hardly ever home, and my mother had depression so badly that she was in a hospital because of it for a year. They had their own problems and I suppose I thought that if the adults at school did nothing then my parents probably wouldn’t do anything about it either. Also at that time I was pretty much convinced I deserved it since I was told that god hated homosexuals.
Anti-gay ideas get passed around from child to child so it only takes a few of these kids to learn things from their parents, or no doubt hearing things at church just as I did, before they’re expressing these ideas at school. So they were encouraged to abuse and I was encouraged to take it. I eventually stopped going to church when I was old enough to stay home. Once I graduated I ran away into the military. I was still in major denial of my gayness and not wanting to be what I was by that point because it was a source of pain for me.
I met my first atheist in the military. We never discussed his atheism but I knew he was atheist and I thought it was strange to see someone who didn’t believe in god. I had always been surrounded by people who believed and never questioned it. I didn’t realize one could question it.
I remained Christian for many years after leaving the church and my whole life I struggled with depression, and understandably so given my experiences. A year before I got out of the military I finally accepted that I was gay within my own mind. It was a very difficult thing to do. I was very depressed afterward, feeling defeated, and once I got out of the military I eventually went back to my parents who by this time knew I was gay because I had informed them. They said they were okay with it, but I still wasn’t. I began to actively try to find a way to painlessly commit suicide. Fortunately I couldn’t find one. My mother found out what I was thinking and got some psychological help for me. The psychologist convinced me to go talk with the pastor of the MCC, Metropolitan Community Church, a church started by the gay community for gay Christians to be able to go to church in an accepting environment.
When I was active at church they just skipped around the texts within the Bible and never went through the entire canon so at that point, like most Christians, I had never read the entire Bible so I simply accepted the explanations from the MCC of what is known as the “clobber verses” from the Bible that are often used against homosexuals by Bible thumpers. However, over the years I grew to disbelieve what the MCC had told me about those verses, and for good reason. I realized what they had told me were contrivances and that they were telling people what they wanted to hear so that they could confidently remain gay and Christian at the same time.
Due to the things that I’ve experienced in school and the military I now have Complex PTSD. I don’t deal with certain stressors very well. I tend to fall apart. Well, by the time I completely rejected the MCC’s explanations I was pretty much back where I started and my depression was quite strong. I was again having suicidal thoughts, however this time I was older and a bit wiser. After knowing I had been mislead before by the MCC I decided to make sure that what I had learned from the church years ago was true before continuing to consider suicide. I began to study the Bible. I read it from beginning to end and everything about it I could get my hands on. Well, I didn’t find that what I had been told was wrong, however I did unexpectedly discovered that the Bible was a seriously flawed book written by humans who didn’t know anything about being gay. Somewhere along the way I stopped my suicidal thoughts but kept studying various sources. The more I studied the more I rejected the Bible as a vague and often incoherent mixture of myths and stories that had absolutely nothing to do with my life. So I was no longer a Christian but still theist with a God concept that was still quite Christian like and didn’t know what to do about it.
I eventually came across the Conversations with God series by Neale Donald Walsch through a friend I met online. I credit that series for helping me fully let go of the Christian god concept. The C.W.G. series’ concept of god is rather pantheistic and my concept evolved into that sort of new age pantheistic type god, but I still kept studying for many months and began doing some comparative religious studies. The internet is full of information about every religion there is and I studied about very many of them. I came across Buddhism, and although I really liked it a lot, I found myself disagreeing or disbelieving too much of it to consider myself Buddhist, and the same could be said for all the other religions I had read about. I began to read about the problems with the Pantheistic concept of god and I eventually became Agnostic, not knowing what to believe, but again kept studying.
I read about weak atheism. It described me then. I had no active belief in a god at that point. So it wasn’t difficult to self-identify as an agnostic atheist and still I kept studying. The more I studied the more I realized that there is no reason to believe in a god at all or even worry about it. Today I’m just an atheist, or more accurately a naturalist. I accept that we live in a natural world and are a result of natural processes. I also accept that we just “are” without any further judgment or concern about intrinsic purpose. I have found that to be not only very liberating, but actually peaceful.
I am still struggling with depression, Complex PTSD, and self-esteem problems, as well as some security issues. In many ways I feel like religion has second-handedly taken a great deal away from me. It took away my ability to grow up in a less stressed environment. It kept me from fully concentrating on my school work due to the abuse so I did very poorly in school. I never went to college because I never believed in myself enough to consider it. Those things alone have created a series of repercussions that have drastically altered my life from what it could have been had being gay simply been no big deal and religion has made sure it remained a big deal. That is one reason why I don’t believe that we are truly free agents but rather that we live under some form of determinism which begins with the circumstances of our birth and through cause and effect we move through our lives making decisions, both action and reaction, based mostly (perhaps even entirely) upon our own passed experiences and the vicarious experiences we glean from others.
It hurts me to know that there are people who are still going through the things that I did. It may be easier in some places in the world to be gay than it used to be, but there are still plenty of gay teens who kill themselves and parents who throw their children out for being gay, and I blame the teachings of religion for perpetuating the problem. I know my life could have been worse and there have been people who needlessly, and almost dismissively, try to remind me of that but I just tell them it doesn’t have to be worse for it to be bad enough.
Tags: atheism, atheist, christianity, deconversion, god, jesus, religion
