5 Life-Changing Things I Learned Leaving Religion to Know God
Religious deconstruction can be hard because often the lies you’ve unconsciously bought into are based on some layer of truth.
And so, on the journey, you’ll often find yourself having to parse disparate concepts you internalized, thinking they were the one same thing.
In reality, they were lies mixed with some form of truth. Ie. Church doctrines and the gospel, or the church’s hierarchical structure and spiritual power, or the Bible and God’s words. None of them are inherently the same thing.
Here are five important truths religion actively prevented me from internalizing as a child by feeding me trail mix with some emotionally abusive lies mixed in:
1. I deserve to live.
The lie I internalized as a child:
Because Paul says all have sinned and the wages of sin is death, I am a sinner who inherently deserves to die, and in order to be truly like Jesus, I always needed to be willing to suffer and die for essentially any reason that benefits anybody else and especially the gospel.
The truth I'm internalizing now:
I deserve to live.
I am not evil.
I wasn’t born deserving of death, I haven’t done evil deserving of death, and the mistakes I have made in this life do not make me deserving of death.
And I don’t inherently deserve suffering, either.
My life has inherent value. It is worth protecting. It is worth defending. It is worth living.
There’s zero virtue in me giving up my life or giving of myself unless I have already internalized the notion that my life and sense of self have some value more than zero in the first place.
2. I am self-determining.
The lie I internalized as a child:
No matter what I choose for myself, God is in control of my life and will push me where he wants me and punish me with negative consequences if I don't submit and blindly obey him.
The truth I'm internalizing now:
I am self-determining.
God didn't make any victim or slave.
I am an empowered being. I have free will. I am my own actor.
I'm not obligated to do anything just because someone asked me to. Obedience for its own sake is not a virtue.
Accountability means that I am responsible for what I choose to say, do, consent to, etc.
To foster a servile, blindly obedient mindset is to disempower and deprive myself of my ability to think and act for myself, which would be to live as lesser than God made me to be.
So long as there is no direct harm, loss, damage, or injury to another, the right to freely self-determine is more important and virtuous than any moral code or set of commandments.
This is why the whole law of God can be condensed into two core principles: love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
3. I need to love myself in order to love others.
The lie I internalized as a child:
To love others is to be willing to give of myself until there is nothing of me left to give because selflessness is virtuous and I am inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things — a faceless soldier in God’s army.
The truth I'm internalizing now:
I need to love myself in order to love others.
If I don't first know what it means to love myself, I can't love God, I can't love my neighbor, I can't really love anyone; I can only serve them from a place of emotional distance and self-erasure.
Having meaningful relationships requires an exchange of emotional connection through the reinforcement of inherent value.
I need to be able to recognize, reinforce and defend my own inherent value before I can hope to either recognize and reinforce the inherent value in others, or find my own recognition and reinforcement from others.
4. My thoughts and feelings are not sinful.
The lie I internalized as a child:
The deadliest sins are all feelings (pride, vanity, greed, lust, envy, anger, laziness); therefore, my thoughts and feelings can be sinful and displease God, and I need to constantly restrain my mind from thinking about or visualizing sinful things because they will lead to sinful actions, and God will judge me for both.
The truth I'm internalizing now:
My thoughts and feelings are not sinful.
There are NO sinful thoughts or feelings.
A sin is a crime against nature or violation of God's law. It requires some conscious action that harms another.
If there is no victim, there is no sin/crime. I cannot sin in thought or feeling.
My thoughts and feelings are my own. They are part of who I am. They are a core function of my mind-body connection that helps me understand, interpret, and interact with the world.
Cutting off certain thoughts or feelings from myself is like cutting off a limb. It actively impedes and limits my functionality in the world, which is ultimately a disservice to both myself and others.
5. God's love for me is unconditional.
The lie I internalized as a child:
Because God has a boundary or standard for those who can be with Him in heaven, his love for me depends on my behavior and whether or not I put the work in to earn his love, and I won't know whether or not I have earned it until he judges me at the end of the world.
The truth I'm internalizing now:
God's love for me is unconditional.
It doesn't depend upon my thoughts or words or choices. It doesn't depend on what I have done or what I will do.
I am loved.
Even if I don't feel it. Even if I don't believe it. Even if I think I don't deserve it. I am loved.
God is the epitome of love and light and life and goodness and beauty and truth. I can't truly know God if I can't comprehend unconditional love.
And any religion that teaches or reinforces a God who loves us conditionally neither knows nor speaks for God. Because God IS the source of all love.
