As I bowed my head and closed my eyes, I may have realized that maybe all the things that I have been told were possibly lies.
I was born into Christianity. My parents dressed me in three-inch-long white booties and a white dress to be christened in the name of the Lord. My father prayed to God for me to be a blessed soul while my mother prayed for traveling mercies for the family. In the midst of all these prayers, however, sat a young girl on a church pew questioning her faith. Obviously, that young girl is me.
I have not voluntarily gone to church in nearly three years and cringe whenever my family says, “We need to go to church.” To be honest, church, was one of the reasons I left Christianity. As a child, I remember being told not to do this or that or else I would go to Hell. I would shiver and my heart would beat fast whenever I sat in the church pews and heard the amens after each of the pastor’s sentences. If pastors are really the messengers of God, they were drawing me further away and I was losing interest.
The realization came to me, one summer day in church when the pastor was talking about Hell and its burning fire and the possibility that Hell’s fire may actually be caused by the sun (probably influenced by the global warming issue). I looked at the beautiful sunlight shining through the church doors, and I wondered if people went to church because there was a loving God to be served or because they were terrified about the punishment he would give. There I realized my real reason for being in church was mostly fear.
I feared what my parents would think of me and what God would do to me. The final straw happened when I went to church one day and one of the deacons gave a sermon about how Seventh Day Adventists (the sector of Christianity I was a part of) were going to be the ones who got the last message from God’s angels. I immediately drew myself away from any organized religion and declared myself a Deist.
I was a Deist until last year when my A.P. English teacher had his classes read the Bible as a literary work instead of as a religious text. As I read and reread the Bible, I realized that it has a great message throughout it, which I believe to be the powers of love, grace, and forgiveness. As I was reading it, however, I started to question whether or not it was really written by “inspired men” like my mother would say. I felt like a lot of the books within it were very misogynistic. It seemed as if women were the reason for man’s downfall, starting with Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit while Adam placed the blame of the Fall of Man on her, to deceitful women like Delilah who was willing to have her husband captured for some money and did not seem to have remorse after doing so.
I am not saying that all of the Bible is misogynistic for it has powerful women like Miriam (Moses’s sister), Mary Magdalene, Virgin Mary, Esther, Ruth and many more. What I am saying is that there is a possibility that some men who contributed to the Bible may have had some biases against women. I also keep in consideration that we read the King James Version and that certain parts could have been misquoted by accident or to fit their beliefs in that era. In addition, with every translation of text I read, I always think of the possibility that some things could be lost in translation. I also believe that not all parts of the Bible have been found and that the Bible may have more to it.
After that, I made the decision to back away from the idea of knowing and embrace the idea of not knowing and being OK with it. I am not afraid to admit that I do not know, but I am also not afraid to commit to a way of life. For now, however, I will admit that I am open and I will always be accepting of other people’s beliefs and respectful of their teachings. I do not mind sitting in a church and listening to anyone’s ideas. Right now I am simply enjoying being human, but I am also willing to believe in something that is higher than me.
All I hope is that others will accept me and my beliefs the same way I accept theirs.
