Belief, Faith, & Religion

“Compulsion or Coercion?”

Prefer audio books, or just want to listen along as you read? Well, to work on my confidence with my own voice, I’ve recorded myself reading my journal entries!
I tend to ramble a bit more on side tangents or more elaborations on what I wrote in the audio, so forgive me. I also haven’t edited them, so… you’re gonna hear my goofs and amateurishness on full display.

Hell of a topic, huh?

I’d like to preface this by saying I am not against any beliefs, faiths, religions, anything, or anyone so long as they are not intolerant. This is my own personal experience so don’t think I’m trying to tell you how to think one way or the other.

I’ve got an interesting relationship with faith and religion and stuff. Not super interesting, but, yknow, it’s my blog, so I’ll ramble about whatever I want.

I was raised as both seventh-day adventist and christian. If you don’t know what seventh-day adventism is, it’s basically christianity if you stop reading after the old testament and the founders were a bunch of delusional pioneer-era americans. Their founding events are literally referred to as “The Great Disappointment” and “The Second Great Disappointment” as far as I remember.

It’s a rather strict religion. And also incredibly inconsistent. It didn’t seem the rules were really fully enforced or even taught half the time. It seemed every meet up outside of one initial church/group would lead to clashing heads and opinions about what the exact specifics of the religion were about. Looking back now it’s honestly extremely amusing.

But anyways. Me. My relation to it.

I was thrown into a seventh-day adventist school, and later a christian one, so the dealings of the religion were constantly being shoved in my face. There were weekly chapel sessions as a mandatory part of the schedule. As such, it was pretty much all but burnt into my brain with a crucifix-shaped branding iron. I was being told these ludicrous stories, from youth pastors, to modern written books, to whoever the school could really get a hand on to give a presentation to a bunch of easily influenced kids.

It sucked. It started making me delusional about the whole thing as well. Part of the problem of when you make something so unbelievably fantastical but it remains so literally intangible is it causes you to start drawing lines where there shouldn’t be, subconsciously. Everything sounds made up, so, yknow, you have to make stuff up, too.

I’m sure it’s not everyone’s experience, but religion made me want to lie. It made me lie all the time. The only possible way I could match up to any of the amazing mythos that were constantly being shoved in my face and down my throat was to come up with my own. On one hand, it made me a good story teller. On the other, it made me a terrible person.

I would lie straight to people’s face about everything. I would make up nearly biblical stories and exaggerations and just kind of go with the same gimmicks all those chapel segments did, which was that, “Yeah it was totally unbelievable, yeah it was pretty much schlock, but you have to believe it. You gotta. It’s my “personal story”, and religion says lying is bad, so, like, I totally wouldn’t, right?”

It’s embarrassing looking back at it now. But infuriating to look back at what was starting to happen.

Around this time, I want to say 2016-ish, well, I probably don’t need to discuss what was going on around then. A lot of things. But faith was being used in a particularly poisonous way by particularly poisonous people. Caught in the middle of it, and too young/naive to have given it too much actual personal thought, I was getting swept up in it. Lines between what were fantastical and what was scarily real were blurring. Years went by of spiraling into this gray area.

I finally caught myself when I realized that this faith, these beliefs, were making me bigoted. I was starting to say some extremely horrible things about people I had never met. I was generalizing. I was just. Repeating. I wasn’t actually learning anything anymore, I was just being told how to think. And that’s what I was doing to other people, too.

I remember just, sitting up at night, thinking about things. I didn’t want to feel that way. I started realizing just how much I had lied and how comfortable I had gotten with it. I started realizing just how much I was hurting those around me. It’s kind of odd, you always hear stories about faith saving someone, but when I started losing it, is when I started to feel a change kind of like that.

My third ex, a wonderful person, he was really the first person to challenge me on such things. They were an atheist, and while respectful of what I said, they constantly challenged my thought. Not to try and convert me or anything, but just to expand my horizons. To un-narrow my field of vision on things. To teach me things I had never been taught by the system that had failed me.

It also kind of helped that the relationship was gay as hell and that’s kind of a big deal in religion so I was already starting to lower those walls but that’s neither here nor there

I’d say it took me all the way up until ~2020 to fully come around to generally where I am now. This is the part of the post where I get into actually relevant information so you can stop being so bored!

“Could you make me an obscure reference?”

I’m at a point now, where, I hate what religion had done to me. An established faith had completely failed me, filled my head with lies, and made me into a volatile monster with no greater thought process than to bend over and bleat. I was so under control by it that I was even deluded into a need to convert my friends and people I loved to it, that I needed to save them, somehow.

Not singlehandedly. I’m not just some victim, I had a lot to learn and a lot to get past to get here personally as well.

If it works for you, great, fantastic. But it’s no longer something for me.

Now, I’m sure there’s more of a term for what I am religion-wise, but I have no idea what it’d be and I hate the idea of belonging to something like that again and find it so disgusting that I don’t really want to look it up, either.

I like to imagine there’s something nice after all of this. I like to imagine there’s someone or something, or multiple someones or somethings out there. Up there. I don’t know. It’s hard to really put into words. A few things have happened to me throughout my life that have felt a little too perfect for coincidence, so I just like to hope that something is making things happen. Something that likes me. Something that cares about me, just for the sake of caring about me. Not because it needs anything. Just love. I hope it loves everyone.

Religious texts have been so unbelievably altered from their original forms. It’s impossible to read them and discern what was even the original point or what is supposedly the “canon” of them.

So I like to believe, just for my own sake, that there’s nothing terrible. There is no hell, there is no terrible torture awaiting those who didn’t follow the rules. If there’s anything, it’s probably nice. For everyone.

As for my general spiritual-ness, the closest thing I can really think about is druidism? Which in itself I’m okay with calling myself because it seems to more-or-less be what you make it. The idea is just generally that you have some kind of connection to nature. Even the triskele symbol’s meaning seems widely disputed and is pretty much pointless, it just looks cool. Like it’s the most nothing title ever.

That or I’m completely wrong and I’m using it super incorrectly. Whoops!

I feel like all life, while not magically or supernaturally connected or anything, should have a basic respect and acknowledgement of itself. That one should show respect to the world and the enviornment, and respect the role that fauna and flora play in one’s life. Like, yknow, I’m not a vegan or anything, I respect what an animal does for me when I consume it. I think all life is beautiful and deserving of the same chances I’m given. This extends to people- I believe all people are equal, and that I am no lesser or greater than anyone else. It’s my duty to love the world the same way I wish for it to love me.

So yeah, I’m some kind of hippie now. Gross! Yuck! Old me is retching.

Ever since I’ve taken this on, I’ve kind of just. Completely changed, in a way. Of course, a lot of other life experiences helped, but lying kind of actively disgusts me now. That’s not to say I don’t do it, because, yknow, like, yeah, everyone does. But now I’m at least aware of it and, well, if you ask pretty much anyone I know now, they’ll tell you I’m kind of brutally honest or that I just have no real secrets whatsoever. I’m pretty sure some of my friends know me better than I do at this point. I can still be wrong, but at least I’m honest now.

It’s also kind of eye-opening how finding your own answers and no longer lying to yourself about anything can make you see so much. I wish more people weren’t afraid to feel themselves and be introspective.

I even made a character based on my beliefs here for Weirdosity semi-recently, named “Na’a Nah’vay”, the first and probably only “God” character I’ll make. They make me happy.

I’m not quite sure what compelled me to write this, but, well, I’m glad I did. I don’t really talk about this stuff very often so it’s just nice for it to… exist, somewhere out there.

So, at the end of all this, if you had to call me anything, just. Call me by my name.

The two drawings are connected btw. Authmind was canonically bludgeoned to death with a crucifix