Why I Left Christianity

April 14. 2023

So, I've finally decided to take the plunge and share my big massive autistic theological info-dump. I've decided to reveal critical parts of the story of why I'm one of what are called "the dones" as in "done with religion." Note that this post is going to be a very heavy read. If heavy theology, swearing, politics you don't agree with, or religious trauma are triggers for anxiety, fear, and anger, that you as the reader struggle with right now, this may be a post you don't want to be reading right now. If you just want the point, read the last paragraph.

So to start, I grew up in an evangelical Christian household. I grew up in the 90s and tried to be like every other kid: a good student, an obedient son, and someone who loved to hang out with kids on my street util it got dark outside in the summer. But no matter what I did, I just felt like I could never fit anywhere. I knew that part of it was the fact that I was sheltered as a kid and never allowed to watch anything about PG or listen to any mainstream music (and I failed at acted like a goof to overcompensate for it), but there was something more. I was overwhelmed by classroom sized and hated crowds of people unless I had a stage to perform as a musician. I didn't care about school and only got average marks unless the subject was on something I was interested in. I just couldn't make friends at all.

I also had a huge crush on a girl in high school and because I'm autistic, she become one of my obsessive special interests. I had no idea what stalking was because churches don't teach consent at all and I kept on trying to talk to this girl I liked whenever I could, even when I knew she didn't like me back. Eventually, my obsession got to a point where I was suspended from school and had to see a psychiatrist (other obsessions and hobbies got me to this point which I plan to share in a book I'm writing about why I left Christianity). My parents hesitated but went through with letting me get tested. That's when I was officially diagnosed with autism and given a basic consent lesson 101 through counselling.

I got over this girl (I mean looking back, she was kind of a bitch anyway) and made the dumbest decision ever...to double down on my Christian upbringing, become a Christian rapper like Fresh IE, and join a young adult group at Masters Commission at Springs Church (now known as Springs College) while building a fanbase through the church. I did make quite a few friends at the time, I was one of the top students in a theology class taught by Pastor Leon Fontaine's mother Jackie, and with the church's motivation was able to produce my first full hip-hop LP.

Little did I know, there was something sinister going on underneath the hip and loud cool-kid mega-church atmosphere and Christian "creativity" and consumerism with the subculture of Christian music (which I was heavily involved with) and Christian movies (which seemed very cliche and boring every time I watch them). All the Christians there were ready to defend or articulate their faith in order to answer questions I had. They were ready to win me over with doctrinal formulations and scripts that I had to learn outside of Jackie's classes to see through them. While I was coached and trained to do that in Master's Commission, I was never one to stand up as it were. I was more the guy who would listen and then respond based on what I heard.

Springs and its members have a way of communicating and presenting evangelical Christianity in a positive presentation. So typically the story goes that every human being is unable to go to heaven, but the good news is that it doesn't matter because God, through Jesus' death on the cross, unconditionally loves us and will forgive us. All the language about Jesus being lord and saviour is presented as if anyone attending Springs doesn't have to do anything (and they say they don't have to do anything because according to the bible, we cannot do anything to gain favour with God anyway, but since Jesus died, God has given us grace in order to access heaven). Springs, like most evangelical churches, presents heaven and salvation as free gifts for any of the church members to recieve. And that's the message they use to bring friends who aren't religious to church.

When Christianity is branded and marketed this way, of course it sounds beautiful and amazing! It's cool thinking that the creator of the universe is so into YOU that God planned reality around YOU since before the beginning of time. No wonder Springs grew dramatically to a church population of over 9000 people in all their congregations combined!

And to add more icing to the cake, you don't just go to heaven when you die, you also get to (according to John 10:10) have an abundant life on earth with little to no suffering. In some churches this is presented as thereputic language, or in Springs case, self-help language wich is part of the consumerism of Christianity. That's what got me in. I made friends in this community compared to elementary and high school so in a sense, this Christian stuff worked, right? God wanted me to live my best life and here I am, happy, in a group where my interests and talents and viewpoints on how awful society is are fully accepted and validated, right? And I actually had a job where I could work my own hours and God was giving me money! So this works, right? God loves me and His plan for my life is working, right? On the surface it all did.

Now that I said all this, I'd like to answer a gaslighting question that comes up: "Why criticise churches who preach this, especially Springs? What is wrong with this kind of Christianity? I'm accepting a free gift of God and then He'll ensure my life goes according to his plan where everything works out and everything is good or even exceeds my expectations? I don't understand what the problem is here! Someone would have to have a really disgusting heart to reject such a gift from a self-less unconditional loving God!"
when people who are let down by the church hear this, some of them may say "Yeah, I might be a little hard on Springs or maybe am taking my questioning too far." or whatever.

The reality that I slowly started to figure out was that there was more to evangelical Christianity than this "free gift." I should have started figuring things out when two things started happening to me: I wanted to get married but the girls at Springs weren't interested and the fact I could never find any work that was above minimum wage or couldn't get a job in ministry.

Despite all the preaching about praying for a future spouse, despite refusing to live secular or like the "fallen world" that Springs consistenty tries to avoid, despite having faith to see good things happen even though autism was an obstacle, despite driving a Mazda Protege and almost getting a record deal with Fresh IE, despite reaching out to youth in the inner city and making a small difference whenever I could at a soundboard, I still didn't find a church girl who would give me a chance. I was also asking questions about why I couldn't find a more stable job or why no matter what I do, I still had to deal with a ridiculous rat race rather than work in Christian music full-time.

In response, when I answered those question, the answer was always "Just give yourself to God, just give yourself to God, just give yourself to God" and then all of that goes away. I'm always told I need to just let go and walk into this "plan" that exists for my life that I never have to do anything to earn which is freely given which is reflected by God's love and acceptance. Really? I gave up my entire future to work in ministry! I learned how to "preach the gospel" outside of Springs instead of studying video game or working in the movie industry with Ryan Reynolds in Vancouver. I gave up on trying to be a superstar on stages outside of churches. I completely cut myself off from the world besides the bare necessities. What more am I supposed to give up or let go of?

It was then that I wish I had figured out that I went through a phase of religious love-bombing to get me into a Christianity where eventually I have to destroy myself for Springs. Deep down, I probably knew that the love bombing wasn't enough, so I left the church and went to college in Brandon. I finally met my wife and started asking more questions as the two of us got closer together. We both saw Christianity very differently and it caused us to fight a lot. Because of our fights and differences in beliefs, I kept feeling like I never belonged to her even though she genuinely loved me a lot. I felt like no matter what, we would be unequally yoked based on our differences in religious ideas since hers were more liberal at the time.

We eventually had to come to a compromise and we both went to Soul Sanctuary after getting married. We did what we could serving there and I discovered something much more different while attending: while the love-bombing of Springs I experienced was similar, we found that while the free gift of heaven may or may not be a thing, the idea of an abundant life on earth is not abundant at all. Christianity is presented as a religion with unconditional love, blessing, and acceptance, but in practice, it's full of conditions and suffering. And part of that suffering comes from the need to conform to the religious standards, practices, or teachings of Soul. While the pastors there were very friendly about my not so comfortable thoughts on this, my wife and I both felt like we still couldn't fit in no matter what we did. We couldn't give much money to the church. It was hard for us to get around without a vehicle since we couldn't afford one as a married couple. And we couldn't have kids because my autism prevented me from finding a good job outside of call centre work.

So we go from love-bombing and being brought or sold into an attactive vision of the church while being told that Christ has a plan for our lives and that he unconditionally loves us and will give us a blessed life to the point where in order to be part of a church, one has to get their hands dirty, to give money and volunteer time, to not only preach the gospel, but to bring new people, to not only have a great sex life but to have kids as well. Once church members are IN (and that includes kids who grew up in a church), the official church members, staff, and long-term volunteers have to do whatever they can to keep the community together.

A church, its pastors, and its staff have to create a need for what's called hi-control religion. They have to craft that need so that people attending the church cannot even BREATHE without it. In other words, the purpose of evangelical Christianity is to replicate its own existence in order to have control and power, not to save people. Churches always use their money for this. That's why they build other churches in other countries. That's why they sometimes have more than one building where one building is located in the inner city and the other is in a rich area where everyone who goes to that "main church" has all the money. This isn't just limited to churches though, this is any part of "the system" where the purpose is to preserve the status quo through social control.

In systems like evangelicalism, in order to experience the full effect of church community, acceptance, and to be loved "unconditionally" it requires submission. When looking at the actual theological doctrine, God doesn't just save like Oprah (you get a save from hell, you over there get a save from hell, and you in the back get a save from hell), God just made salvation possible. In order to submit to this offer, one must confess with their mouth and believe in their heart that Jesus died on the cross for them and their sins (Romans 10:9). Only then, will they be fully saved. This is why baptism is always encouraged when it comes to milestones at a church. According to most evangelical church pastors, God requires that church members fully accept this knowledge of salvation.

"Okay, so that's not too bad. I mean, freedom to choose from Christ himself, right?"
But the issue here is that evangelicals claim that the consequences of not making that choice are going to hell or experiencing hell on earth (EVEN FOR PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T GIVEN THE OPPURTUNITY TO MAKE THIS CHOICE!!). That's the problem. This means that to effectively make that choice to recieve salvation from God, we all need to completely give up ourselves to the church, its pastors, and church leadership.

What people tend to miss is that one of the defining features of hi-control religion is the task of inserting itself as the mediator and voice of God. It insists its leaders, institutions, and practices are the necessary means of encountering and knowing God, meeting the demands of God, and recieving His blessing or abundance. The hi-control religion becomes indispensible and it becomes the means of attaining knowledge or salvation through God. It makes itself the means of divine access while at the same time declaring divine authority for its control over church members. In a sense, responding to God isn't about something that's freely given anymore once submission happens. Christian "freedom" becomes defined as subjegation to the demands of the God (which in actuality, the demands are about how the church sees God). The gift of salvation turns out not to be free at all, unless we fully accept of God's authority and church members' ability to uphold this God's high standards and obligations, all while shaping their lives around certain customs that are acceptable to the religion's God (and who defines what is acceptable? The hi-control religion).

In 2016, when I saw that clip of Trump mocking a disabled reporter and found a Twitter tweet indicating he believes that vaccines cause autism, I knew he was bad news. I finally pointed this out to Christians not knowing that James Dobson called him a baby Christian and C Peter Wagner of the New Apostolic Reformation claimed he will bring America back to Christian conservatism. They started treating me like I was crazy and told me to be open to alternative perspectives and to think for myself (to be clear, Christians NEVER EVER think for themselves, even progressive Christians). They also did the same to my wife when she didn't like Trump talking about grabbing women by the pussy.

So based on all this, I figured out that despite being promised salvation, if one fails to live up to a "core" standards of a church (even if that standard is unknown such as having to vote Conservative or Republican to be considered Christian), then how the church thinks of that person will be determined based on that hi-control religion or leadership of the church. In the case of me speaking against Trump, the evangelical's righteous man of God, they pointed out how "wrong" I was through the Bible, Christian tradition, church teachings, or something a random online evangelical pastor or evangelical church leader said in order to claim that their divine authority is central to meeting the standards of God within the mechanism of control in evangelicalism.

As well, the level of control used by the church is totalizing. Hi-control religion such as evangelicalism claims its status as the mediator between God and the church membership. Because God is...well...God, evangelical Christianity is not just simply about belief. It's about emotions and the practices of hi-control religion based on those emotions.
There are dedicated times to feel good, dedicated times to feel sad, and dedicated times to feel angry. It's about who we're supposed to love and oppose and hate (yes, the church says love everyone even your enemy, but then turns around and judges innocent people). It's about what we can and cannot do with our bodies, what we can eat, what we can watch or listen to, etc. I could go on. The point is that hi-control religion has to control the destiny of human life instead of salvation. Control in evangelicalism isn't just about believing the right things, its about feeling, doing, and BEING the right things.

And to make this sound even more sinister, the authority of hi-control religion is re-inforced because we're stuck in a game where there is no winner besides the leadership that's in control. So salvation isn't given. It has to be maintained by living a life of obedience and submission to "God's will" which is determined by the religion's leadership rather than a spiritual being. But the church teaches we're all fallen and sinful and we can't measure up to God, and yet we cannot meet the standards of the hi-control religion anyway, ergo, the church members have no choice but to depend on the religion or leave. So church members are stuck in a fully public room made of glass with a tiny door walking on eggshells living in fear because one slip away from these high standards and that church member doesn't just go to hell; they are shunned by their community, they are gossiped about, and they can't volunteer in the church or be trusted with anything.

So knowing all of this, if a church's leadership, pastors, or church members are abusive or do something or even ENABLE something that ruins a church member's life? Well guess what? It's God's will so the church still has to submit no matter what happens. And this is why whenever people leave the church, they always leave with shame,guilt, fear, anger, and anxiety. They experience these emotions after failing to meet the hi-control religion's standard. And nothing changes, even when leadership is called out publically whether it's a sexually abused women acusing the pastor of raping her from the pulpit or if Jesse Duplantis or Joel Osteen are given bad press because of what they do with their money in the name of the prosperity gospel.

Once a church member shifts from being love-bombed by being told "God loves them" to conforming to the ridiculously high religious standards of only being male or female, neurotypical instead of autistic, or supporting Trump rather than Bernie Sanders or Biden or to try to conform to the standards of evangelicalism set by leaders both genuine and corrupt, they go from being happy to being afraid, and even when they leave, that fear doesn't fully go away. Hi-control religion like evangelicalism thrives and replicates its existence based on that fear (so faith over fear my ass. Fear is what keeps people going to church while the church and religion are claimed to be the cures of that fear). The church and the religion in this scenario is THE ROOT CAUSE of the anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, and anger that church members, who don't meet their standards, feel. Those feelings become the core religious emotions while the leaders and pastors promise that they will go away. The careful planting of those uncomfortable emotions is a part of the source code of evangelical Christianity.

When people like myself or my wife question why Christians worship Trump when they should be worshipping Jesus, they expose flaws and abuse I just talked about that is behind evangelicalism trying to keep itself above water in a world where it's completely irrelevant. It questions its need to be in power, and church members who have bought into the vision of their church or religion do not like anybody in or out of the church questioning it, not one bit. It happened at Springs when I asked them why they don't collaborate with other churches, and it happens all the fucking time when I asked why Christians support neoliberal con-men like Donald Trump or Pierre Pollievre. Asking questions never meet the standards of hi-control religion. People who act different from the "divine" standards set by pastors and leaders (who act as mediators for God) are essentially a threat to the message and culture of "free salvation" offered in Christianity. This can be anything from accidentally swearing after a church service in the building to at worst, being in a polyamorous relationship or shooting porn on Saturday night and going to church on Sunday.

When I got the full grasp of this, I realized that something super fucked up was going on. So I looked into the core teaching of evangelical Christianity in itself after being out of the church for almost two and a half years now. And what I realized was a brain breaker. So if you're already uncomfortable reading all of this, take a break and then come back if you want to finish because it gets heavy from here.

So let's now look at the actual core evangelical Christian doctrine that's been preserved for centuries without the church in the equation.
To start this off, who or what is this God that evangelicals worship? They claim this God is a perfect being in all ways, without flaws, without character defects, and without any kind of impurity, whatever that means.

Based on EVERYTHING I just outlined in this entire post that is way too long, this God DEMANDS our worship and adoration. For the non-religious people reading this, yes, it sounds ridiculous because it is. I remember when I was a Christian and a hip-hop artist, I was going around being all like "look at me! look at me! I represent God so you need to pay attention to what I spit in my verses blah blah blah!" Imagine a regular person with a social media setup going around saying "I demand you like me on Facebook! I demand you follow me on BlueSky! Heart all my posts on Instagram! Comment on all my posts on Mastadon! Flood my threads on Discord!" This is the quickest way to get people NOT to admire or worship that person. But then members of a church will say that "God is worthy of worship and adoration" when people ask why. They'll say he DESERVES it. It's always a central part of almost every single religion that ever existed.

Think about this: what kind of God is this? Doesn't this complete flawlessness spirit have any notion of self-acceptance? Isn't this God content with who he is? Does this God already know his worth and value? If God knows that God is perfect, where is the insecurity of this "perfect" all powerful all knowing entity? And why does anything that God creates have to acknowledge how perfect that God is? Why is being perfect, all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, all consuming God NOT SATISFIED with accepting how all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, all consuming he she or it as a God actually is, but has to demand that anything around (from weak animals, flawed humans, strong elephants, to even stones (Luke 19:40) has to adore, obey, and worship this God?
What does all of this tells us about this God?

How can a God who can redeem all humanity, as a true act of ACTUAL unconditional perfect love, choose to demand worship and adoration instead of just saving everyone whether they choose to adore or worship God or not? That's not unconditional! That's a program, an if else conditional program ( if human worships and obeys God { human is saved } else { human does not get saved } ). And when someone asks why this is, the pastor or leader of a religion will say "God acts only from God's own will" which is the crazy insane circular reasoning way of saying "There doesn't need to be a reason. God is God." This doesn't sound like the God from the Bible who saves humanity because they can never measure up. This sounds more like Thanos just deciding to get rid of half of humanity for no reason (even though technically in both the comics and the movie he had actual motives that made more sense).

But then when asking that question, a pastor or church leader will say "That's not a moral imperfection of God at all because God is worthy of worship and obedience. Because God deserves his status, it's not bad or strange or even hurtful or wrong." Ok, from here, just...what the fuck...WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK?!

While in Masters Commission, I was learning about John Maxwell and leadership. What I learned was that having authority is not the same as being a leader. If someone has to appeal to a person's authority in order to follow them, that person is not really a leader. A leader successfully leads people because they inspire them with a vision they have or they have a logical way of doing something in order to progress forward with something. If a leader pushes followers to do what they say while demanding adoration and worship, that's an authoritarian not a leader.

People follow leaders because the leader is worth following. True leaders have a track record of results. True leaders have come through for people with lasting life-changing results. True leaders have actually done something good for their followers. And people don't follow a leader willingly because a leader threatens to punish people. When threats are used to get people to follow coupled with the agenda of demanding worship, that's a breakdown of leadership. Think about Game of Thrones where Lannister says "Any man who must say 'I am the King' is no true king" if this isn't clicking.

This leadership concept is the perfect analogy for thinking about the evangelical God. If their God is really worthy of worship, there would be no need to threaten people with punishment, hell, or eternal concious torment to get that worship or adoration. If people want to convince me that their God is worth admiring and worshiping for life, the threat of punishment, fear, gaslighting, manipulation etc needs to be eliminated. And for that to be effective, religious structures in "the system" need to be completely removed. Let's see if God is followed by more people afterwards. If they don't, maybe that God is not worth worshiping, let alone following at all.

So the point here is that a morally perfect God would save everyone and give everyone an abundant life because that's what a God as a leader would do, not because people worship or adore an authoritarian narcissistic childish God out of fear of being punished.
"But God did save me and I'm experiecing all these good things compared to when I was outside of the church in the past." Then why do other people suffer and then are happier when they leave the church? It seems to me that based on this, you're not being blessed by God, but you're either in the love-bombing areas of evangelicalism or you're benefiting from the PRIVILEGE that comes from conforming to the religion, which very few in the church actually experience to the fullest.

The last line of defense that evangelical Christians will use when discussing how God deals with adoration and worship goes like this:
"Well God is God! Aren't we all flawed? We can't judge what perfection looks like because of our human mind has limitations. We don't have the qualifications to define what holy perfection would be." In other words: "God's ways are not our ways." It's saying that spirituality in itself is so far from our human understanding but we still should worship this petulant non-self-accepting child of a God anyway. This is where I get so angry that I literally have to hold onto something to keep my fist from sending the person who says this to a dentist. By saying this, the idea is communicated that we should never critique, judge, or question this God. That's why I want to scream for blood when I see or hear this statement.

The paradox is that if you can't question, criticize, or say that this God doesn't exist, then that God is not a perfect being at all. And what is absolutely baffling is that evangelical pastors and Christian thought-leaders make their living claiming that they know what God's ways are and those ways are perfect. They get money while saying that no one can know what God's perfect ways are, even though they spew an idea that they think is CLOSE to what God's ways are. This is not okay. This is insane. This is why evangelicalism is a scam and yet for some illogical absolutely fucked up reason, it has become one of the most powerful ideologies that is driving our world's economics, our world's politics, our world's education, our world's standards of who should run the world and who should have a meaningless life, and even determining our world's purpose for doing anything. For a religion that uses an ancient scripture that says "do not conform to the pattern of this world" (Romans 12:2), they sure know how to make people subconciously live out one of the worst patterns in the world: capitalism. Anyway, why is our world like this? The pastor would say "Who knows? God's ways are higher than our ways because he's sovereign and he deserves to be worshiped and adored even if people are lying on the a concrete floor dying without food water or shelter about to croak and either go to heaven or hell. We don't know what God wants and that's just the way it is." What a way to damage the brains and hearts of church members who buy into thinking this way. It is sick and abusive.

Before getting to the breaking point where I became an agnostic (or depending on how things go, I may just go straight to aethiesm in the future), I want to discuss the really deep epiphany of something I touched on quite a bit earlier which everyone knows in the back of their minds: that the evangelical God requires the suffering of others, not just worship and adoration. This God requires that blood be shed in order to ensure that purity exists. There are so many examples of this that I could point to biblically speaking and of course we all obviously know the best example if God sacrificing His own son on the cross. And not only does this petulant child of a God who needs adoration and worship allow suffering of others on earth even if they didn't get a chance to choose to give that adoration or worship, but they have to suffer in hell for all eternity. This experience is described in evangelical spaces as "eternal concious torment." Really think about what they're saying here.
So to add all this up, the all loving, perfect being without issues or flaws, all consuming entity who needs adoration and worship, who has the ability to save everyone, chooses to torture most people by default for all eternity if they don't choose to love and obey this God. This is a core teaching of evangelical Christianity. This is part of the source code as I said before. This is the whole complete reason church members need to be saved and accept this free gift of salvation.

I know for those reading this who grew up in church, they get it. I know that people who've heard about and study religion get this because of how central the idea of hell is in Christianity. But what people tend to forget is how normalized this abusive and mentally damaging teaching actually is. It's masked until people see how horrible it is long after they stop going to church.

What I had to figure out is that there is absolutely nothing one single person can do in their short lifetime that could warrant an eternal punishment. It's so disproportionate that there is no analogy to it. If someone downloaded a cracked game without paying for it, got caught, and was beaten to a pulp every hour on the hour for the rest of their entire lives until they died from all the bruises, as punishment for playing that game without ever paying Nintendo, it wouldn't even come close to approximating the abhorance of a doctrine that says a person who rejects or doesn't get the gift of salvation will be tortured FOREVER. It completely goes against the notions of equity, propriety, or justice. This is the vision of that God who is perfect, who knows all, who understands motive, who understands logic, or WHO HAS COMMON SENSE. Just think about that.

And this kind of teaching is PRESENTED TO CHILDREN, children who want to feel safe, children who want to have autonomy over their bodies eventually, children who want a sense of identity, and children who want healthy attachments to their siblings or other relatives in their lives. And Sunday school teachers tell kids they're so sinful and flawed that they deserve eternal concious torment unless the children do what God says. That is a horrible immoral model of perfection. If I became a parent and I raised a son or daughter to love and worship me or I would hurt them until one of us dies, CFS would arrest me and I'll have to get snipped! And yet, it's fine to turn this shit into a teaching about God. So gross. So disgusting. I don't know if I want to cry or start puking, especially knowing that this idea of torture porn is at the core of evangelical Christianity.

This whole idea is the reason why religion, especially evangelical religion, makes people so unhappy, so traumatized, so angry, so oppressed, and it makes people feel trapped even though they are physically free from the church itself. This whole idea is why people leave churches feeling abused, feeling like they're not good enough, feeling like no matter what they do they'll never get something they need, feeling like there must be more than all of this. Because the only agenda in this religion is to preserve the legacy of that vision and the profit and power that comes with it (and if they do help people, it's only done with the motive to keep the religion in power, so don't give me reasons where churches setup schools in Africa or that they sent stuff in Operation Christmas Child boxes because its colonialism with a cross on it which I may talk about in another post).

So after figuring all of this out, I took the entire summer and fall of 2023 to question everything I believed. Where does right and wrong come from? Why are people so obsessed with making a nation Christian? Why do progressive Christians stand for everyone being treated equally and fairly while conservative evangelicals go on and on about law and order or common sense? And why does the status quo stay the same no matter what Christians say or do, and if things do change, why does life just get progressively worse?

I came to a conclusion that if we live in a Western society, we all just metaphorically use some kind of built-in moral playbook that society has given to us. What we should be questioning isn't rules and morality in the game itself, but the actions we take in response. I used to believe that everyone knows right from wrong. I used to think that just telling Christians to stop supporting Donald Trump, stop being a racist, and stop blaming poor and disabled people for their circumstances would actually wake people up and make them more accountable to what Jesus or the bible says. I was wrong. I was very very wrong.

I had to figure out that right and wrong or even rules or guidelines in general aren't set in stone. Rules are not the same for everyone, especially rules of the rich VS rules for the rest of us common folks. I figured out that believing in moral law or enlightenment is just like believing that the earth was created in seven literal days. Besides Christians thinking autistic people are demon-posessed, the idea that good and evil are just out there in the universe like gravity just didn't seem logical to me. This idea, along with mom screaming at my wife and I to have children or we're disobeying God, got me to quit believing in evangelical Christianity and going to church.

When people talk about universal moral truths or when conservatives talk about "common sense," I feel like those people are trying to sell us something just like how churches sell the idea of salvation when love-bombing their congregation. If we have to believe in salvation or laws by faith and not by sight because "God's ways are higher than our ways", why the fuck should I care about them? It's like saying Ashura is the reason we shouldn't litter — if Ashura isn't real or just a totem poll, then littering is okay, right? That's the kind of logic that just didn't add up the more I thought about it.

So, from this new logic, I had to ask myself if I should just do whatever we want. In exploring that question, I figured that a large part of conforming to any system (whether its religion, politics, capitalism, leftist ideologies, or even tech) is embracing the idea that there's some moral rulebook out there that everyone has to follow. But in reality, our evolving values help us individually determine what's right and wrong over time. We all have to figure out what we value and stick to those values, because the values we have are what will help us be more fair and just much better than written or moral law ever could. And many times, those values will be different from our friends and families or from what we were brought up with. I don't even have the same values or priorities as my wife. Determining what you value should be like making your very own exclusive playlist on your iPod or if you have MP3s on your phone or whatever, the point is that you need lots of variety with morals and priorities instead of set in stone rules or guidelines that can't change as the world changes. Sure, part of suffering in life is navigating value or moral differences when people disagree or I get it wrong, but at least I'm able to be who I really am as long as I don't physically hurt or kill eachother.

I also found the idea of moral law and Christianity with its doctrines of suffering and obedience has been used in history to justify wars, slavery, Jim Crow, Residential Schools, purity culture, ending Roe V Wade, and even the use of tariffs and "buying Canadian." We're all fighting over whose ruler is the coolest and whose God is cooler. You'd think by living in a democratic society we'd have moved past that by now. Nope. This is the suffering we get from trying to make sense of the world while living our lives without injuring people in our communities. Maybe it's about time we start making our own decisions about what's right and wrong without an ancient set of rules, random podcasts, legacy journalism, pastors, or celebrities that nobody can agree on anymore.

I find though that an exceptionally good rule, that all should follow, is that we should all love and respect each other because we want to. The reason people are sharing memes that say "no one is born racist" or "no one is born a fascist" is because becoming a murderous psychopath or obeying a petulant child of a God who thinks self-acceptance isn't enough is taught by people who need power. We were not born in sin. The most evil thing that murderous psychopaths can teach is that doing good things for one's personal survival (rather than harming others) is actually the most evil thing to do because they want to gaslight or control the people beneath them.

I didn't leave Christianity because of anger towards an actual God that exists. I left because the hi-control religion associated with evangelicalism hurts and traumatizes people who are simply just trying their best. I left because of the same reason why I think politics, capitalism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, and even many progressive ideas are extremely flawed: because in order to be taken seriously or to build community, they need pre-determined rules that no human can measure up to. Do we need rules? Don't we need some way of enforcing a no-killing rule or a no-stealing rule? As a guideline, perhaps. But if conditions get so bad that people suffer because they can't pay for food or they can't defend themselves against someone who isn't nice, then pre-determined rules need extra values that determine when they need to be followed and when not to follow them (and yes, this epiphany even changed my view on masking and lockdowns during the pandemic). Set rules have never been clear to someone like me who is autistic. Set rules have never been beneficial for marginalized people who can't get certain jobs or keep up with technology. Set rules have never held powerful or rich people accountable. And the people who deserve hell or punishment get a slap on the wrist while those who break rules trying to measure up either lose the game in the end or are completely destroyed by "the system" to the point of just wanting to end their own lives.

I left Christianity because the way it accepts people and enforces rules while enforcing praise as law is no different than the so-called "woke" "DEI" western world it claims to set itself apart from in the first place, a world that thrives on the suffering of its opponents rather than the progress of the most vulnerable.