The period of my adult life I lived as a Christian is a portion I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully forgive myself for. Not because I believed in something I now see as false or that I’m ashamed for taking so long to seriously evaluate my worldview. Cognitive dissonance combined with religious indoctrination from childhood is a difficult combination to overcome. I’m happy to be liberated (Thank you to all the people who gave me a harsh reality check, even if I took it personally at the time). But what forms guilt within the deep reaches of my mind is sourced from the beginning, from that beginning when I was able to understand the implications of my beliefs. During that span I utterly—it feels in every aspect, failed to live in light of the cosmic horrors I had been taught from the Bible.
Initially after my deconstruction I was able to suppress this guilt by considering the times I sat in tears asking God to, “Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to Thee.”1 Those days were often extended periods of time where I would remove myself from music, video games, course work, and even friends; replacing that time with Bible study and prayer in an effort to allow God to have control over my life.2 He never changed me, never spoke to me, and never used me for his purposes. As one would expect those repressive actions led to crippling depression. What I enjoyed and the people I loved were ripped away from me in an effort to consecrate myself to a God that I’m convinced now isn’t there. From those attempts to sincerely read his word and communicate with him, I received in return – silence.
Hearts aren’t really our guides
We are truly alone
‘Cause God ain’t up in the sky
Holding together our bones
Remember we used to speak.
Now I’m starting to think,
Your voice was really my own,
Bouncing off the ceiling back to me.
God, this can’t be.
God, this can’t be,
God, could it be that all we see is it?
Oh, my heaven, why do you have doors to close?
Do you have clouds to stop his voice on the way down?
God, does grace reach to this side of madness?
‘Cause I know this can’t be,
The great peace we all seek.
(Did your clouds stop his voice?)
And brother have you found the great peace that we all seek?
You say take a look around.
If there’s a God, then he must be asleep.
God, must be asleep
God, must be asleep
God, must be asleep
God, must be asleep
As Cities Burn – “Contact”
I was promised God would speak to me through his book, that it would change my life if I would just read it and talk to him. This lack of response logically should have made me see the likely truth, this God does not exist. But being surrounded by people telling me with surety and confidence that God spoke through his word to them created within me crippling self-doubt. By the end of these cycles, there was left to observe only, a complete destruction of any self-confidence I had. I was a horrible, irredeemable person that not even an all-powerful God could make use of. I was worthless.3
Anti-natural morality… turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, “God looks at the heart,” it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life, and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch, Life has come to an end where the “kingdom of God” begins.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 4
However, what I realized when separated from those experiences is that I was never to blame if God was truly indwelling me. As a sinner, I would have no ability to live out a life proving this new birth. Therefore, it would be God’s responsibility to act through me; especially if I was sincerely asking God to, “Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to Thee.” The same is true for the silence I received. It is not the responsibility of the ignorant child to have a relationship, rather the responsibility of the knowledgeable parent to initiate, build, and especially demonstrate practically a healthy relationship. God’s moral responsibility is only amplified by the incomprehensible gap between a human being and an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God.
Excusing the Dagger of Condemnation
A dagger of condemnation against my very being entwined with hypocrisy still lingers in reality though. If my belief was a delusion, then I must deal with the truth of my inaction, utterly alone. No God to bear the blame for my moral responsibility.
One of those cosmic horrors grafting responsibility into my being—eternal torture.5 A concept, which when comprehended should have changed me, utterly and completely. A true revolution of the soul should have taken place when I also believed there is an escape from that fate. To procrastinate while seeing people I care about and humanity as a whole headed to the Lake of Fire was to be complicit with their future suffering. Living, even for a singular moment not devoted wholly to the end goal of saving people from this horror would be to utterly fail at life. This belief demanded an obsession and clarity about the world I found myself in. To make avoidance of this singular life with the eternal end in mind would be to die without comprehending the eternal – the one I was blindly dying death into.
So naturally, I made up greater fictions to excuse my complacency. These were arguments of necessity to repress the guilt about my hypocritical life. One of the ways I would justify my inaction farther was found within the knowledge that trying to convince people of a claim without evidence was deranged. I had knowledge that I would lose friendships with people I love. If I am no longer their friend, then I can no longer display the love of Christ to them (I believed at this point that the only way to prove God is to live in a way that made him evident). This excuse was evidently pitiful though, because I knew deep down that I could never live up to any standard that would be worthy of evidence.
I had tried to surrender my life, but God didn’t want it. There was no supernatural living possible for me. I was still holding hope. Someday, something would change inside me; or God would slowly improve me enough through the gradual submission of my life to him. Someday I could prove God to the world. That day when he would finally work through me–change me to no longer care about myself, but others.
Witnessing as Hypocrisy Itself
The task of witnessing was made even more impossible apart from my own hypocritical living by a bile amalgamation of bigots, adulterers, fornicators, drunkards, liars, and thieves which started inhabiting our government; laying claim to being the representatives of Christ himself. People who if allowed to enter the Kingdom of God, would turn it to hell. Because of them, you–true Christian should pray to God not to let salvation be through faith alone. For these “true” followers will certainly deport you from heaven when they find Christ not a valid passport – foreigner.
Spreading the gospel found another obstacle as well, believers I looked up to as better Christians than I would ever be—who I respected—began to openly support these Antichrists. They thought (and still think) that they might have their taxes reduced marginally and Christ would be kept as part of Christmas. To meander in these petty politics while people are headed to eternal torment is to ignore someone being brutally murdered in front of you because you don’t want your shoes to get dirty. I would have to acknowledge this anytime I would desire to advocate for policy which would contribute to positive social impact. There would be a feeling of guilt when desiring to partake in this activism because I knew I should, “just preach the gospel.” However, on a Wednesday evening prior to the start of a Bible study I was attending, I realized that this view was pure evil (even from the perspective of my previous worldview). In my silence, I was allowing this bile to form within the church. This turned Christ and the Christianity I was attempting to preach into the Antichrist himself, right under the church steeple. All before I could even blink.
That Wednesday evening occurred shortly after the DOGE cuts had taken place and reports about the effects of these cuts were in wide circulation. There was food sitting in warehouses rotting away with no one to deliver it anymore. 6 It was undeniable, people were going to die as a direct result of Elon Musk’s deceitful delusion and greed. Even if one could make an argument that we can’t afford those programs because we need to pay for the billionaire’s tax cuts that we never paid for when they went into law7 ; there still needed to be a transition process for these programs. Even taking the assumption given without evidence that there was widespread fraud within USAID, we still know that USAID was at least functional because an inventory of aid existed. Money must have purchased the food sitting inside warehouses, which meant there were also real workers transporting that food. If funding is then cut, that food will not get to people depending on it. There is no moral argument capable of justifying instantly cutting that aid without any warning whatsoever. But that’s what Elon Musk did, unelected and without congressional approval. We now know hundreds of thousands of people are dead as a direct result of a soon-to-be trillionaire’s pure greed, and it is predicted millions more will die still.8
There I was, sitting left to process all of those horrors while waiting for the Bible study to start. I happened to come out of my focus to hear a believer I highly respected for his willingness to tell people about Christ start laughing about how triggered the left was about the DOGE cuts from across the room. While people were finding out they were going to starve to death, I was finding out even the Christians I looked up to were already starved of the love, care, and sense God was supposed to supernaturally give them. They didn’t actually care about anyone in a supernatural way, just like I didn’t. There was simply just less social anxiety about expressing their beliefs to others. During this section of my life, I was haunted by the reality that God didn’t want to answer my prayers. Those prayers were simply asking him to make me care enough about people to take action.9 It now bothered me that so many other Christians never seemed to be haunted in light of the callousness they found all too much in common with me.
While I sat there in silent complacency, the Antichrists were busy debasing society to their religion. Attempting to cast us together through force into the dark ages. My silence in an attempt to maintain good relations with other Christians so we could share “the truth” was a practical evil committed by me which is beyond what I can process. If Christianity creates a hell on earth why would anyone assume heaven would not also be hell? If the gospel I desired to preach had been reduced to this bile, that is all anyone would see even if my mouth preached the most tender of truths. Not only would the gospel be of no effect, but the world would be made a worse place as well.
When the Christians I found myself around started believing the same evils which justify the construction of consecration camps,10 and now the public execution of living beings they believe contain eternal souls on their way to eternity. The conclusion must be that this is a false religion. Otherwise, God is either incompetent, dead, or a monster. Laying claim to Christ while being complacent with those directly advocating for the seal judgments to be released upon earth was to be myself the Antichrist.11
Because of these horrific cults of hate within Christianity and my own hypocrisy–I would, predictably sometimes be met with hostility when attempting to talk to people about the gospel. Rightfully so, if that is God they would do best to avoid him at all costs. But most people I would speak to about the gospel found it mundane, something with no transformative power. That was more tragic to me. To find the gospel normative was to look at my life as a Christian, mixed with whatever else they knew of Christianity as a whole and declare–not that God is evil; but rather, “There is nothing other worldly about this gospel at all.”
Later in my Christian walk I had to reform my views on the afterlife. Eternal punishment for finite wrongdoing cannot be justice. Even if it somehow could be justified, it certainly could not be when even the very best of God’s people are, Human, All Too Human.12 How can God judge someone as a sinner, worthy of condemnation when God can’t even convince them the text which tells them about God’s subjective morality is true? How can God’s people live as if he doesn’t exist?
As I began to escape my young earth creationist indoctrination through my teenage years, I quickly realized that I would never be able to convince an increasingly educated society of God’s existence through verbal argument (let alone the God I believed in) because I couldn’t even convince myself through science. The only way to prove that Jesus actually saves people would be to live a life so utterly confounding that it proves I have a relationship with my God. Failure to live that life should disprove one’s God to themselves.
The challenge then to Christians is to create a Christianity which proves itself, to falsify the fallacy of circular reasoning–thereby confounding reason itself. I utterly failed at this task, to the point where I lost my faith in God’s existence. I was willing to believe even while acknowledging all the counter-evidence, faith was not something which had to make sense to me. But when God couldn’t change me, that first bit of doubt started to creep in. Still, maybe I was just doing something wrong. However, when I realized all the Christians I looked up to weren’t changed either, that was a face of God all too false; all too human.
Though the odds seem pretty slim in the face of the evidence, there is a possibility God’s silence was indeed a result of my own shortcomings. It could also be that I was looking at the wrong set of Christians. Would a Christian, show me that’s the truth? Can a group of Christians please prove to an increasingly Christ rejecting world that God does indeed indwell a subsection of humanity which cling to faith? Please save humanity and display with undeniable clarity that God is indeed, Love itself!
When the Cosmic Horrors Turn to Myths
In reflection upon my past, I find healing in the truth; the truth that divine providence will never change me. Dependence upon the unsubstantiated is at best good luck (in that I happen to be right or the cosmic chaos randomly favored me), at worst delusion—leading away from that which begins my healing. Healing for the collective one. To heal is to realize that moral progress is not controlled by an ancient storm deity, therefore self-improvement is possible. That improvement comes with the journey of affecting change for the better in our universe. There are no quick dopamine hits in the process of improvement. Now there sits only the principles gathered through lived experience, giving us the will to transform The truth to The action.
We must then firstly and urgently speak The truth, casting away the delusions which harm society in a vicious cycle of repetition. Religion (if it is one that warps our future reality to a falsehood) and capital are the first delusions which must still be deconstructed.
Religion, because a lie in the end will kill us. For some, religion provides temporary relief amidst our uncertainty.13 The issue with these soothing tales is found when those false comforts refuse to actually address reality. While steeped within that blindness, reality comes during midnight–beating us over the head without pity.
To believe magic will someday “fix” our cosmos is an evil all to itself. It allows one to find comfort in doomsday. The guarantee that where we’re headed won’t end up in a Mad Max reboot, but rather a literal heaven is to pathetically capitulate the next generation to a planet earth sunken into the depths of hell. A world where evil men bring humanity to a fate more torturous than death, only because the good of humanity are satisfied with fables. Fables where the good guys win in the end. The problem, reality doesn’t run parallel to a fable. Evil can triumph as it has through most of humanity’s history. Evil will triumph again in our day if we allow fictions to numb us into an assured silence built upon delusion.
Capital, for if more Christians read their Bible they would see capital for what it is—the corruption of humankind.14 Indoctrinating all of humanity into conforming to work which is ordered foremost to obtain capital (or for most, simply money) is to corrupt the human soul, perhaps in irreligious terms – brain rot. A certain portion of those who become infected with this brain rot also become capitalists.
A capitalist, as I define them is someone who will do whatever it takes to pry away more capital from other people. After all, that’s what they have been taught is their very purpose for life. They have succumb to “the root of all evil.” The capitalist murders, exploits, lies, and steals; they will do anything to make money, no matter how much it invalidates all that is healthy for life. “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”15 Yet when pressed about their immorality, and in many cases illegality of their actions they possess a clear conscience. For they believe capital has replaced nature itself. Even that Money has usurped god. The new morality of the universe is the most torturous game of Monopoly ever played. One in which the game is purposely elongated by giving other players one dollar bills. This is done solely for the pleasure of the inevitable winner, that they may gloat longer above the bodies they have cast into the streets. All of this while claiming their capital is a result of superior living, not those dead—lining the byways.
There is no evidence that a cosmic judge waits just beyond reality to bring these capitalists to justice. Justice must be fulfilled then by our own accord. The responsibility of God, inherited now by the humanity which foresaw his death. There is no complacency which finds itself in the realm of justice. For justice is using human feet to walk into the market, and when there using human hands to overturn the tables. Afterward using human compassion to aid those downtrodden by the market’s oppression, so that the next generation has a vision when you depart the market dear Christian.16
Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should share with those who have not, but he who would carry out this principle would be speedily informed that these beautiful sentiments are all very well in poetry, but not in practice. ‘To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself, ‘ we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of double-faced morality, And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of civilized man.
But society cannot live thus; it must return to [The] truth, or cease to exist.
Peter Kropotkin – The Conquest of Bread 17
Footnotes:
The Lambent 