from suffering is my hobby...
This picture sums up why I deconverted and how. God stopped being a friend and just became this big jerk in the sky who seemed to enjoy hurting me. It got it's jollies torturing me. As I have written, I worry that we are now in the apocalypse. All of that doesn't make me feel happier towards God, just that more suffering will come and for too many people. God will blow up the planet, and let us all have endless plagues unleashed upon us. My studies of Revelation lasted for years. All the worse conspiracies and bible prophecies I studied all seem to be COMING TRUE.
I wonder how many deconverted from Christianity because we were told essentially "If you always pray to God and have faith, God will make your life easier and better and He will help you!" For many of us things didn't pan out that way. There is this one legitimately NICE woman I went to high school with. I'm friends with her on Facebook. It is sometimes weird to see how the lives of my classmates turned out. My disabilities are pretty severe but my life is nowhere like theirs.
She always treated me well with my autism/weight even when we were in high school. She became a United Methodist pastor. She believes in God and Jesus. She's had a good life and had several kids and grandchildren today. She is financially well-off and close with her family from childhood and her children. I like her and always have. She posts things on her wall that she is "blessed" and she is right. I am thankful I have a husband and food/apartment etc, but this was a world I never could relate too.
She sees the world as a "nice" and "happy place. Why wouldn't she? God definitely seems to care about her. In this case, she is not evil or a narcissist and she is nice to the down and out. Maybe God has blessed her with a nice life and she will go to heaven. When I became a fundamentalist years ago, I know it was because I wanted to "fix" my life and get things sorted out. I sincerely wanted to do what "was right" Would Christianity had worked out for me, if I didn't have so many bad things happen and so many losses? Would I still be a Christian if I had stayed in my old rural town? Maybe I would have. God let me down on so many levels, it's hard to explain.
Sometimes I have wondered why some people get such hard lives and some good lives. This lady has happiness, wealth, good marriage, family, and more. Perhaps she is one of God's chosen. Remember this is not someone I bear ill will towards. She is kind to me. Now let's take someone with a crummy life, and I am not talking about me, but I've known people who have far HARDER lives then me.
Yes I am the "forever victim" to some internet snobs, but there's people who had a far harder path. If you look at some third world countries with lack of access to clean water or food or those living through active combat, their lives suck beyond measure. Some of the people who had worse lives than me had health issues as bad as me, but died far younger and had no support whatsoever, there was no spouse in their case. Severe stage Lipedema has taken people I know. Some of them ended up in poverty or died at ages younger than me like two online friends.
It's horrible to contemplate how God plays favorites. The worse thing about traditional Christianity is how they never had good answers for suffering, it was always "your fault" or "your sin" or "you lacked faith". In my case, the promises of healing were given if I strengthened my faith or was "delivered". Some of the coldness I see now worries me on the right, where they chastise people for feeling afraid. Why wouldn't people be afraid as society seems to be collapsing and they are threatened with plagues whether you believe those plagues are real viruses or not.
Sometimes my thoughts ponder "things not turning out". My life was one trying to jump through all these hoops and being told I was not good enough. Getting old with massive regrets sucks. The only thing it seems that didn't go bad was marriage. His life hasn't been easy and he deserved a lot better too. My happy high school mate, isn't burdened with regrets. She's working on a vacation home, and volunteering at a homeless shelter. The world to her even with Covid remains a pleasant place.
The religionists often copied the messages of my parents. I remember how excited and eager I was getting circa 2016 and on, about taking my life in a new direction and it seemed doors were finally opening and maybe I would feel the place of belonging I once had in my old community and have some direction and new happiness. There was hope, joy and light. Then Covid came.
Speaking of this stuff, I got one worry going through my head, how come all these people I try to help always end up worse off? My prayers for others never worked either. Everyone who got cancer died. I have tried to explain to Christians on my way out the door, how this hurt.
There's now this other woman who hates my guts who I tried to help. She just cut me off. My other autistic friends say neurotypicals often misunderstand people with autism and they had neurotypicals cut them off for the same reason. My husband thinks these people just use me as an emotional trashcan and dump me when things don't go their way. My help was sincere. I never had money or things to give them but would try to come up with ideas However I did start to ask how come so many people I cared about [well I found a few false friendships in that mix] have everything default to the bad? It's this kind of stuff I really wonder about. Why couldn't their cancer be healed? Why couldn't they get help to come out of poverty? Why did it go so wrong? My one friend who died last year had a very hard life including time in homelessness, and she died so young.
Why do so many negative events happen in this world? When I deconverted I thought "Oh I must return to rationality" but one thing I realized is our leaders really truly are evil. Millions have died and if warnings about the clot shots come true there will be many more millions.
I feel overwhelmed often. Maybe this is autism and some lacks on my part via problems like ADHD, deafness, severe medical problems. However it does seem to be even beyond my failings. So many bad things seem to happen, and I do recognize the good but there's a point in life where you feel like you will fall into the sand trap constantly. I get the feeling that those who feel "blessed by God" seem to have very different lives. Many of us arrive at the point where we feel like God is just another being that wants to hurt us over and over. Of course Christians will say that's Satan doing those things but where's God? Where's the intervention?
Traditional Christianity basically failed for me, because it didn't have an workable explanation for human suffering and my own. I saw too many suffer horribly and not things that worked out for any good end either. I remember being upset about all those kids starving in third world countries and asking a pastor or two why God allowed this to happen. Whenever I talked to pastors and others, the underlying message was always "It's your fault" and it boiled down to bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. One pastor told me regarding the third world countries, "Its because they worship demons." Now that sounded messed up. Now some would claim Christianity has been messed up by the prosperity gospel in general but that message was all over Christianity. "God will help and protect you." When those promises fail, so wonder people leave.
Even for years after I left, while I still like Jesus and His teachings, Matthew 24 seems to be in full swing now too, in the dark of night, I would wonder, "Why didn't God love me or my friends? Why did He allow so many lives to come to total ruination? Why did He let my small town be destroyed and uproot my life there? Why am I now in my old age in a dystopian? Why is He allowing these oldsters to destroy the earth and millions of people? Why aren't I allowed to be happy?"
Lately I've been studying Gnosticism. I am not a Gnostic just studying these things as "theories". At this point in life with religion I don't think I am ever going to arrive at any final answer especially when I made the fundamentalist error of thinking I had it all in the bag. So it's religious theories. More and more I think truths are scattered among alot of lies. The powers that be use religion for control but there's truths about the golden rule and perhaps some about cosmology.
It sometimes has concepts that are hard to wrap ones mind around but they do see the God of this earth as "evil" and harmful, the Demiurge wants to make us suffer and created the flood and other life troubles. The God of the Old Testament in their lexicon is a different figure than the Creator God that Jesus Christ followed. Some are Gnostic Christians who believe the messages of Jesus were skewed, I believe along that way a bit believing that the blood sacrifices and whole death focus was added in later. Others are not Christians.
They believe this world is a place of suffering, a "prison planet" ruled by archons who feed off "loosh" or human suffering. At least they admit this world is a vale of tears unlike modern day Christians who focus on how blessed they are. I had this weird thought as society has disintegrated and the world we see in old movies with loving families and connection disappates, why wouldn't more people believe this way? Something is very wrong here. Can "I'm a blessed Christian"/prosperity theologies last in a dystopian world? It makes me wonder where religion will head in the future. In times of crises people usually do turn to religion. I can see the present day prosperity evangelicalism falling maybe to be replaced by something else.
I sometimes see the constant stress on self-improvement to be a matrix trap, the monied, the thin, the normals do well in this life but many do not anymore. I agree one does not want to keep walking down the sidewalk falling down in the same holes. Some of us the very lack of money is a trap in itself. I don't feel there was always that many options if that makes sense. Like the net was closed. I've come out of severe poverty acouple times or made moves to new places that worked out. Once I saved self from homelessness doing an extreme move, but it's like a life of being chased. You don't succeed you merely survive. I don't feel as much control over it as they tell me I should have. Usually it's me outrunning some form of a threat related to an unpaid bill or medical problem. LOL
My family used to call me a failure but they helped to set it up that way. God just became another finger wagger pointing out my faults. A time in life came where I needed a nice God who would comfort me and that wasn't being found in fundamentalist Christianity. Jesus always seemed nicer to me but the cruelty of God was strewn throughout the Bible especially in the Old Testament. This is where I came to my beliefs about hell.
The message in our society is the people with the good lives are much more deserving. I don't know. Sometimes I wish I could watch a day to day life of one to see how they pull it off, but maybe they are so busy, I would pass out trying to be them. They all do seem to have confidence and families that love them and a sense of belonging, I do not relate to. Their brains work with focus and purpose, they do not worry. Some seem better off not thinking about things too deeply and maybe their superficiality gives them an edge. They aren't troubled about new world order or matrix and God is this nice guy in the sky who loves them. They aren't a weirdo fat autistic who thinks about things too much, they get things done. I'm over 50 years old so have to accept, that I am not like these normal people.
Did they all make the choices that brought them these lives or was it a spin of the dial and beneveolent spirits or deities around them like this lady believes God to be to her. Wouldn't believe in God as loving come more naturally if you've had a good life and feel like things will work out? Wouldn't it impact your religious beliefs.
I'm in a strange period now, I feel like science and liberalism have failed me utterly. I knew they had limits but with science being used to harm and basically some of the warnings about transhumanism I learned in fundamentalism coming true, it's disturbing beyond belief. The human genome is being invaded by the mRNA. When I was a Christian, I went deep into Revelation, and Revelation 13, when you know how to translate the Greek plainly says that "Pharmakeia" will fool the entire world. What's going down now? Let me give you an example of my fundamentalist reading material circa 2009.
Read this and ask yourself does any of this sound familiar now?
"I warn of a day when true humans may unknowingly receive transhuman instructions via an implant or injection. A seemingly innocuous vaccine or identification ‘chip’ can initiate intracellular changes, not only in somatic or ‘body’ cells but also in germline cells such as ova and sperm. The former alters the recipient only; the latter alters the recipient’s doomed descendents as well.”
https://www.contendingfortruth.com/transhumanism-vaccinations-dna-and-corrupting-the-seed-of-mankind/
Remember this was written in 2009, I used to read this guy's stuff all the time and read it years ago. I used to write about transhumanism on my old conspiracy/bible prophecy blog. I even knew about CRISPR and all that.
I probably am not a agnostic anymore but believe in a Creator God though obviously I don't want any return to the domination and authoritarianism in Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Hell still seems very wrong to me. That's the Universalist side. I still see goodness in the teachings of Jesus and some of the Bible. I envy those with strong faith that does comfort them. I'm hanging out with Christians online on some issues of the day. The world definitely is in some huge battle between good and evil now, that's a given. The failure of the liberal world to stand for freedom was a wake up call but even then I still see the dangers of the right wing world. DeVos, Thiel, and the Dominionists aren't our pals either.
Oh if you are one of those people who think MAGA is going to save the day, and ignoring how Trump was behind Operation Warp Speed, don't get too excited. Tucker Carlson and the rest don't care either. The right wing still supports the same technocracy matrix they are now building the bars for. Take a look at this company owned by Peter Thiel and what it plans to do. Google Palantir. One page talks about vaccine compliance with employers. They plan more of this stuff. I talked about this in the last article too.
There's people in other religions realizing the evil of what is happening too. I have found that to be interesting. There's New Age and other websites warning about the spiritual harm being done via Covid vaxxes and more. Lately I do wonder if Jesus really did warn us all of what was coming. I don't want back in the fundamentalist and evangelical cage, but one chapter in the Bible I think of all the time is Matthew 24. Lately I do remember a lot of my old Bible studies and there's too much happening now not to think of some of that stuff.
I think about this religion, and I am ex-Catholic as well, and how it operates on the DOMINATION level. Everything is about conformity and making you submit. And you are not allowed to have thoughts that question anything. Even your own thoughts can be a "sin" like "mind control" and that bothers me too. Maybe I am too autistic to do religion well. There seems to be a demanded conformity. I did that one speech on technology but my world view is so complex. They'd probably flip their lids if I told them what I thought about bible prophecy. Some folks would probably double flip their lids, if they knew I was watching videos on bible prophecy and scripture. I have been kind of troubled by all the spiritual underpinnings of Covid, the lack of truth, the lies, people's embracing of what is illogical and based on delusion. When I boil things down, I think humans should honor what is true [also what is good] that's being lost in this Covid mess.
I told one guy online,
"And you are right I don't agree with a lot of Christianity. A lot of it was spiritual and psychologically abusive and spiritually another prison. I still like Jesus a lot and his messages but believe everything was SKEWED to the max by the priests, religions and powers that be. Everything is focused on DOMINATION and SIN and HELLFIRE now."
Religion is a prison for humanity. I think the prison planet people got that piece right. I think Christianity [not teachings of Jesus] got scripted for domination and control, it's multilayered."
I wrote this to someone else on a message board too.
"I think religion got skewed making everything about evil sins and God being turned into an abusive parent who is ready to whip everyone's butts with a big belt and then throw you into eternal flame--would be considered a sociopath/serial killer if it was a human in the real world. This is a messed up view. I don't think this is what Jesus intended. Guess that's the Universalist in me speaking. As for creating my own God, due to my own conscience, I can only worship one that is about love and compassion, and cares about human beings. Human beings love revenge, hell is about human desire for revenge.
I have no problem with a God of love protecting the innocent from the wicked, etc, but even the idea that God cannot change the wicked is kind of messed up. Human prisons are more merciful [in western nations] then sending someone to burn forever in hell. With spiritual abuse and more, and what I see among deconverts, Christianity has a massive problem, the coldness, authoritarianism, cruelty, etc, is showing itself especially among evangelical and fundamentalist circles. "
All that said, running to the world of liberalism, and secularism, that has provided no foundation of truth. All our institutions have gone to levels of never dreamed of corruption. I can't believe what I see people accepting, believing and embracing. Maybe my religious past as a Christian fundamentalist applies to today. Maybe I can't fully erase some of what I used to believe. I probably will remain a religious outliner for life, I even remained in the UU by default, since I am technically a Universalist and see some truth in other religions [not all] but obviously I've been on some different roads.
I figure God can deal with me the best way He can. He will know what I went through. The threats of hell, teachings that you deserve everything bad that happens to you, etc, are harmful to human race. Until humanity grows up beyond seeing God as their revenge maker and abusive parent, we are probably doomed for worse. Even all those elites who desire so much power and money, are trained in a system that is all about domination, winning and who has the MOST POWER. Be careful of the view of God they want everyone to have.
I still don't know why God allowed so many bad things to happen. Trying to figure that out will just keep a person going in circles.
I analyzed my bad choices in life, but a lot seems wrapped around sheer illness or brain functioning problems and fatigue. I don't feel like I chose some outcomes. I did do marriage right but I worry about his suffering too in this world.
This world doesn't make any sense to me anymore. Maybe I am in the middle of another spiritual crisis. There's got to be others like me out there knowing something is really wrong and realizing how hard it is to grasp the language to describe it. We are in a battle of good and evil. Everyday I wake up hoping there is a good Creator God out there who will make it all right. Maybe that's something I never lost belief in.
