I’ve been a strong sceptic of God, Jesus and Christianity as a whole for all my adult life. However, it wasn’t always this way. As a young child, I had a very solid belief in Christ and the teachings of the Bible. However, a series of events throughout my early teenage years would lead me to realise that this life of faith in the Lord had been forced upon me and drilled into me and I knew no other. It took me the best part of 2 decades, but I eventually realised my belief in good old JC was just a house of cards that would become more and more unstable before it finally came tumbling down.

Disclaimer: I fully respect and support all belief systems and viewpoints. This spew does not aim to criticise or bash other individuals or groups based on their religious beliefs, nor does it aim to either convert or deconvert any individual or group. It is simply a personal account of my own religious experiences, delivered in my usual funny but dark and heavily unfiltered style. No offense or harm in any way, shape or form is intended from this spew, and any harmful or offensive comments will simply be rejected.

My entrance into the light

On September 28th 2001, my first birthday, while I was presumably far more interested in the cake than in theology, I was baptised into the Christian faith. Before I could think, speak, or form a single opinion of my own, I was dumped into a tub of water and quietly signed up to a whole world of unproven stories and non-existent cloud men.

I’ll be fair here: I don’t hold it against anyone. It’s what you do. It’s tradition. It was meant kindly. But that is rather the point. The very foundation of my faith wasn’t something I chose, it was a decision made about me, not by me. The first card was laid down while I was busy learning to walk. You can’t consent to a belief system at twelve months old. You can only inherit one, and I did.

Primary school: no escape from the broadcast

Then came seven years of reinforcement. I started school in 2005, with every day starting with a hymn or 2 in morning assembly. Fine. Things like that are pretty much standard in primary schools. But every now and then, a scripture reader would come in and you’d lose about half an hour of your life, whether you wanted to or not, hearing about how Jesus performed such feats of genius as apparently making a blind man see again simply by touching his eyes. Keep this in mind, we’ll tie back to it later. In 2009 I started at a Church of England primary school, so things were really no different. God and Jesus were part of the furniture, served up several times a day, every day. Hymns in assembly. Mandatory weekly church services. Christian songs playing quietly in the background at lunchtime.

It was like a news story that’s saturated everything. The TV, the radio, every website you open, and it’s all anyone will talk about for days on end. There was simply no escape from it. Looking back, I’d call a lot of it what it was: indoctrination. But I didn’t have those words at five, or seven, or ten. I was a small child, so I did what small children do. I nodded along, sang the songs, and assumed the grown-ups knew what they were talking about. Another card, and another, and another.

High school: when the stress test started

I entered high school in 2012 and this is where the whole thing started to wobble.

I was on the edge of becoming a teenager. Puberty was coming, my brain chemistry was shifting, and my mind was widening whether I wanted it to or not. Biology, chemistry and physics were teaching me how the world actually works. Religious education, of all subjects, and other lessons on topical issues taught me how to debate, how to question, how to hold a belief up to the light and turn it over. I started meeting other ideas, other religions, other ways of explaining the same universe.

And the cracks appeared fast. I realised no one can reverse the chemical reactions that follow death; a body isn’t a slow computer you can simply restart. I realised the “holy water” I’d been dunked in as a one-year-old was just H2O. Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, regular water with a few words muttered over it. For the first time, I could see a gap in the four walls I’d been trapped inside since before I could remember, quite literally. An escape hatch. And I fully intended to use it.

So I started asking myself the questions nobody had ever invited me to ask. Do I go on exploring this ever-changing, ever-expanding world, why it is, how it came to be, or do I keep singing about a mythical superbeing who supposedly raises the dead so they can move into his little cubby house in the clouds? Do I follow science, logic and reason, which update themselves the moment better evidence turns up , or static nonsense and delusions that never do? In my head, the two couldn’t coexist. One of them had to win.

And then there was the question I couldn’t get past. Why would I believe in a god who quite happily hands very young children horrible diseases and rips people’s closest friends and family away from them for no reason at all? Ah, but it was Satan who gave that five-year-old cancer, not God. Fine, but if we’re all made in God’s image, why is he sitting up there scratching his balls while two devastated parents watch the most precious thing they’ll ever have slip away in front of them? Also, why is God so desperate for those kids anyway?

By the time I was three years into high school my faith had been thwacked over the head with a metal pipe. It was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to the machines, just about clinging on. Not getting worse. But not getting any better either.

The final straw that was evangelicals

In 2015, my mother fell in with a group of older women in town who belonged to an Evangelical Christian movement.

To be clear, Evangelical Christianity across the board is a broad, decentralised church. A lot of it genuinely values free thought and honest questions; in plenty of these groups, you’re allowed your doubts. My mother’s group was not one of those. They were fiercely devout. They rammed their faith down your throat at every opportunity, seemed incapable of talking about anything else, believed in shunning non-believers, and met the faintest flicker of a question with yet more indoctrination. It bordered on high-control-group territory, and it used very nearly every technique those groups use to pull people in. It worked. My mother embedded herself in it completely.

Naturally, she tried the same conversion tactics on me. But by then, the battle was all but over. Atheism had the upper hand, and no amount of Bible verses or word-twisting was going to turn that tide. What she hadn’t thought through was that it would all eventually backfire on her. She couldn’t stomach the idea of turning her back on her own son over the “crime” of not believing. She said as much to the group. They took it as a personal attack and fell out with her almost on the spot.

Late 2015 was the deciding point. The life-support machine was switched off, the house of cards came down, and I officially stopped believing in our so-called Lord, who, incidentally, has to have his pronouns capitalised. The genocidal, homicidal, infanticidal, zoocidal, specicidal, fascistic, tyrannical, power-hungry, delusional, self-obsessed narcissist that he (sorry, He with a capital H) apparently is.

The reminders of why I don’t believe

Deconversion and deprogramming aren’t single events; they’re positions you keep arriving at. Two recent moments reminded me exactly why I stand where I stand today.

The first was something I read online. A totally blind person, like myself, had been told that God would give them their sight within a year, if only they’d believe in his grace and glory. Take my own condition: Optic Nerve Hypoplasia, or Septo-Optic Dysplasia. The claim, apparently, is that if I believe hard enough and pray for my sight, the Lord will hand it over inside twelve months.

Two problems.

  1. The mechanism. God is going to hear me, a few words muttered in my head, or spoken over the noise of a church service, from a being supposedly billions of miles up in space, and in response, regrow my optic nerves, wire them correctly into my brain, and have the whole system up and processing signals from my eyes?
  2. The timescale. Within a year. If God is as almighty as every believer insists, why the wait? Why not instantly? If God allegedly created the entire universe, with its virtually infinite size and magnitude, in just 1 week, surely he can restore sight or cure one person of a terrible illness in a literal instant? You’re mindfucking people into believing in a hypersentient cloud man while quietly downplaying the very power you’re selling them. Well done, everyone!

The second reminder came just a few days ago — a line someone quoted from their church pastor. Paraphrased: “anything that is dead shall come alive again in the name of Christ.”

And we’re right back to the body that can’t be rebooted. There are countless causes of death and countless states a body can be left in afterwards. Chemical reactions and processes unfold that no scientist alive knows how to reverse. I believe science will get us there one day, but we have a very, very long way to go.

So: why aren’t the millions of harmless, innocent children lost over the years to disasters natural and man-made smiling and laughing with their families, the way children are supposed to? Why are friends and families still left carrying the devastation of losing someone they loved? Why is my dad still a pile of ashes in a box? Why hasn’t his body been restored to the healthy state it was in before the cancer? Why did a bond and a friendship that so many of us built over many months have to be ended so brutally on 29th June, 2024?

Anything that is dead shall come alive again in the name of Christ, right?

In fact, let’s play the system at its own game and Bible this out. Ephesians 5:6 says

Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.

Are claims that God can restore sight to a blind person inside of a 365 or 366 day period and that everything that is dead shall be restored to life in the name of Christ not merely empty promises believers place themselves under the illusion of because it’s easier than accepting centuries of battle-tested, medically and scientifically proven research, verified beyond all reasonable doubt? If so, God would like a serious meeting with you in his office at 9:30 AM tomorrow.

The ground beneath the rubble

The house is down, and it’s never going back up. But here’s the thing nobody warns you about: standing on the bare ground is not the frightening place I was told it would be. It’s steady. It doesn’t ask me to explain away a dying child, or promise a blind man his sight in twelve monthly instalments, or tell a grieving son that ash becomes a father again if he only believes.

I was handed a house before I could say mummy or daddy, before I even knew what a house was. It took me the best part of twenty years to work out that house was just built on a sloppy foundation, held up by nonsensical ramblings and unverifiable delusions. I’m not sorry it fell. I’m only sorry it took the metal pipe of truth, the hospital bed of doubt, and more than one funeral to finally knock it down.