http://elroy.net/ehr/steps.htmlThree Easy Steps to Losing Your Faith
A lot of the people I’ve met who lost their faith, or people whose life stories I’ve read who lost their faith, lost it because they followed at least one of those steps.
However, I then read the author’s bio and he’s lost his faith, but then says “Today I continue to believe in a loving God, but I can no longer claim the Bible to be his Word, nor can I claim myself to be a follower of the Christ most Christians follow. I have become one of the most liberal people I know.”
So really, he hasn’t lost his faith. He’s just unhappy with Christianity as it currently stands. Join the club, pal. You would only interpret this as “losing your faith” if your faith was dependent on the Church and their version of the Bible and Jesus to begin with. This is something I don’t get. Mine isn’t- mine can’t be. It’s not
allowed to be. But I don’t think it ever really was, either. I don’t know how to explain it but I think I always knew I was somewhat alone in my specific way of seeing things. I know I never found the churches I attended or the people in them to be particularly reliable but they’re just people. I’m also angry at most of my relatives and a good portion of the teachers and other kids I went to school with. What’s your point? Nobody can ruin my religion for me except myself.
I was going to recommend this site, but then as I dug deeper into the articles I began to find this author pretty bloody annoying. Many of his opinions and arguments are almost predictable- like I knew he was going to:
trash talk the OT God while displaying jaw dropping inability to get it (unless those were satire, but they didn’t seem like it)
play the “if he was really omnipotent nothing bad would ever happen and I’d have a pony” card.
Write a long, convoluted, arrogant and confrontational rant about “losing his faith” that ultimately makes no sense if you spend any time actually trying to follow it.
While somehow managing to come off worse than the conservative Christian pleading with him to return to Christianity.
Play the “God’s people are his representation =I see them being awful=either God is awful or this religion is a false one” card
"They wouldn't let me think for myself!"
Turn out to have had a fundamentalist/spiritually abusive childhood.
So that kind of dampened the excitement of finding all those nice articles.
One of the great things about being evangelical, since we “don’t respect sacred tradition” is that I can believe whatever I want to believe (obviously, there’s a cutoff point, because there’s a line and if you cross it, you do kinda lose the right to call yourself a Christian but that line is just much thicker and further away for me). I can read any version of the Bible I want to read, pray however I want to pray, make whatever crazy pronouncements I want to make, I can choose any role in my church that I want to try for. I’ve met people of all sorts of different types of Christianity, there’s great variety even in the denomination I was raised in (the difference between Nazarenes in the Northeast and Nazarenes in the Southwest/Bible Belt is pretty shocking). And I’ve seen the rules change multiple times. What I’ve learned from this is that Christianity is what I make of it.
I have as much control over my spiritual experience as I want. There are definitely things that are wrong with Christianity, and there are specific people to blame for that. For people who were truly abused by this religion, it’s probably harder to change the way they view it. But I wasn’t, not any more than the average person, and I’m still in control of much of my own religious experience.
I mean, good grief. I follow a pretty bizarre form of the religion and yet I refuse to let other people ruin my Jesus experience. If I did, that would mean they won.