leaving the church to find God

I have been so against organized religion for such a long time. I've been full of distrust & resentment towards any form of organized religion, believing (to this day and possibly for the rest of my life) that all organized religious bodies are corrupted by a lust for power, money, and control of the brainless masses.

It has taken me til recently to understand my original intentions for leaving the church: I needed to find God for myself.





So here's some back story. I was raised in Catholic and Buddhist settings in VN. I came over to the states & attended a Methodist church with my family because the only Vietnamese people we knew in America were affiliated with that church.
We moved down to Atlanta and my family went to a Baptist church.
For the most part, my father sat outside in the car & waited for us to be done.
I never knew his reasons til now.
He probably had the same beliefs that I do. That this is all fucked up and we were all being brainwashed.
I admire that he decided to humor us instead of forbidding church attendance in general.

In my teens (12-17) I attended an Assembly of God, which is like Diet Pentecostal, aka Pentecostal Lite.
I sang along with the shitty, mediocre, unimaginative songs. I raised my hands during their praise & worship because everyone else did too and I honestly let myself believe that if I tried things their way it would help me to get a little closer to this faceless god that everyone so blindly follows.
They fed us political BS about what it truly means to be a "good Christian" and live a life that is "right with god", and like many of the other attendees I ate it up til I could vomit their rhetoric back at anyone who doubted.

The only thing that accomplished is losing many friends and making myself out to be a complete jackass.

I passed their righteous judgment. I refused to budge from their belief system even though it makes no sense. I turned into a hateful little drone intent on doing what they, and I, believed to be the work of this god.




But then I realized many things.

1. They couldn't answer some very simple questions. How are we going to make the world better? Why do we raise so much money to expand the physical building that we call church but we rarely talk about raising money to help out the local neighborhoods? What the fuck does sitting around a bonfire on the shores of Panama City singing crappy songs have anything to do with being Christian?

2. The church body (it's people) would love and accept me unless I >>> a. am not hateful & judgmental about Muslims, b. ask the sort of questions that revealed how little everybody knew or cared about what following Jesus really meant, or c. flat out fuckin' flaming queer and loving it!

3. I felt more like an outcast with these supposedly loving individuals than with the "heathen nonbelievers" they so vehemently despise. (Yeah, that love the sinner hate the sin bit is total bullshit. What gives any of us the right to determine what is sinful in another person's life, eh?)

4. I was becoming more hateful & narrow-minded, completely missing the whole point that this Jesus guy talked about.

5. I'm too fucking smart for this shit.

6. Everyone, including me, put on the sickeningly sweet, polite face on church grounds. We all acted and spoke like complete douches when we were anywhere else. Nobody was comfortable being themselves at church. WTF!



So I ditched the church.

And I was angry & resentful with what I thought was God.

I realize now that I don't want to run from God. I had to leave the church, cleanse myself of their indoctrination, and reject every belief of what this god that they brainwashed us with is. So in a way that makes me an atheist, if I reject all the notions of THAT god.

I had to leave the church to find my own salvation and to find my Savior wherever He is really hiding.

Because if I have learned anything in all these years, it is that Jesus is rarely found at church.