Chris Burnett
I grew up in a conservative evangelical home and the first time I can remember giving my life to Christ was at the age of 14. When I was 9 I went through an episode where I had over heard someone say that if you die with a sin that was not repented for you will go to hell forever. At this tender age mind took this and began to obsess about sinning and going to hell. A cuss word would pop into my mind every few seconds and I would quickly pray for forgiveness. Then instantly the f bomb would pass through my head making it necessary for an all Holy God to send me to hell for eternity for my 9 precious years of life. After a couple of months I became exhausted and let this go before the fear of hell resurfaced at the age of 14. It was at this time I held a match to my hand and thought, confess or burn in eternity forever. It was an easy decision and I prayed the sinner’s prayer over and over. For the next 10 years of my life I never felt like I was good enough for God, but I continued to believe I would get my life right with God and things would be okay. It never became better and eventually I walked away from my faith, largely due to the thought of hell. Estimates were showing something close to 90 percent of humanity was going to hell and 10 percent saved. 90 percent of humanity was going to burn in hell forever! I’m simply astonished how someone can believe that hell is a just punishment for a 0 to 90 year life span of sinning. If Christianity were true I still had to admit that it the gospels were bad news. Worse news than the holocaust. In fact Hitler only burned those who died in the furnaces for minutes. Since these Jews had not accepted Christ, God would keep the furnace going kindled with races of all kinds.
Another major reason for leaving my faith was due to actually reading the Bible. When you grow up in the church the stories get told from a slightly different perspective. The Old Testament is taught to children in picture stories. Then it disappears for the most part from the every day theology of the church. No one wants to dig past the image of a rainbow and the ark. What about all the innocent children that drowned? One of the central themes through out the entire Bible is the exodus story. Can we really celebrate a God who murdered so many children, but chose a few to Passover? I know, I know this is all old covenant material. God will make sense of it all when we get to heaven so don’t ask too many questions. So I looked to the New Testament. I read through it over and over to understand what God wanted from me, but I continually felt like I was schizophrenic. Bart Ehrman recommended reading the gospels horizontally. I read the resurrection stories from each gospel, and surely they can’t be written by the Holy Spirit. There were to many inconsistencies surrounding just one incident. I began to read more and found the gospels incompatible with each other as well as the Pauline epistles. I came to the point where I thought I could keep believing if I thought the Bible was of man, but it became a silly game of me choosing who God was.
The more I looked at what was going on in the world I began to feel God couldn’t be in control. Nothing seemed fair. I thought of how stupid it seemed for the Christian right to be arguing against abortion. Keeping these babies from instant heaven so they could live in this world and most likely be shipped off to hell seemed evil. Furthermore, when I heard about a mother who drowned her 5 year old daughter so she wouldn’t be able to go to hell when she became of age, I agreed with her thinking. God became a monster. A monster I will have to be forced to bow a knee to or shown from a different angle.
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