http://open.salon.com/blog/lj_barnhart/2012/01/02/why_i_stopped_believing_in_godBrilliant essay
Towards the middle of college I decided to put it all in and really discipline my life to God. But the more time I spent praying and meditating the more delusional I became. I started to have visions of absolute destruction that I would somehow manage to escape. Then there was the night in my dorm room, being taunted by spirits. I looked in the mirror and had the distinct sense that I was no longer in my body.
It felt like I was in a life or death struggle. A poltergeist. If Jesus wasn’t inside of me, the spirits would take me over and I would be obliterated. I really believed this. All the fear I’d been brainwashed with, and all the guilt, and my complete split personality was driving me mentally insane. I’d been severely depressed since the age of nine and had been suicidal for ten years. But it was really just the need to kill the side of myself that wasn’t me at all. It was the side that everyone around me wanted me to be. I felt so much pressure. I can remember my disbelief going back to the age of five – but all that time fear had ruled the roost.
After college I began the long, arduous process of retraining my brain how to think outside of the false concepts of religion. I went to extremes, breaking the old self through pleasure. Eventually, I grew numb to all of my devices for forgetting. It took me ten years to finally be ready to face what I really felt. And then I began to feel a great deal of anger.
More and more I began to see that pastors and leaders in all faiths are simply people hungry for power. They like to preach that if you love God, you will get rich. But if bad things do happen, never question God, and never question the pastor because his words come from God. Of course, power and libido are made for each other. I witnessed the downfalls of many pastors, usually due to a secret sexual life that leaked.
Then there is the issue that religion and the concept of God are completely man-made. “God did not create man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization (Hitchens,
.” If you take the Bible literally (which many Christians are taught to do), God comes off as a complete mental case and a reflection of the lunacy of man. And religion is responsible for more lunacy than anything else in the history of humanity.
“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience (Hitchens, 56).”
It seems lazy to never question religion, or explore all the evidence against it. But it has more to do with fear. When you are infiltrated with a belief system from birth, and told that everything else is wrong, and everyone you know is within the faith; if you leave, you have nothing at first. You have to build a new life. You have to change the way you’ve been trained to think and die to the old self to be reborn an individual.
People will always try to explain the universe. And the more unbelievable it is, the more people are apt to believe. “It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities (Hitchens, 161).”
Topic: Why I stopped believing