by Rena Sherwood

Created on: October 22, 2009

This writer used to be a Born-Again Christian for nearly 20 years. For the last ten years, I've been a Witch with atheistic leanings. I certainly don't believe in an omnipotent Deity that gives a darn what I write on Helium. It's a bit of a jump but I feel much better not being a Christian than when I was a Christian. That's why I'm pretty sure Jesus doesn't love me - or just about anyone else, for that matter.

Accepting Jesus Into Your Heart

You'll hear about this a lot when a Christian tries to convert you. In order to be saved from hell after you die, you have to accept Jesus into your heart. You firmly believe in Jesus and Christianity and the Bible and all of that. This is a ritual suicide, where your old self supposedly dies and you are "reborn" as a Christian.

Now, here's where the argument falls apart. I accepted Jesus into my heart when I was four years old. I certainly believed, but I felt nothing. Years later, after reading testimonies of people who accepted Jesus into their hearts, I thought I'd somehow done something wrong. I certainly didn't feel any happiness or peace when I did it.

So, I tried again. And again. And again.

I felt absolutely nothing. Well, I did feel fear that I was still going to hell and shame that I could screw up something seemingly simple as accepting Christ into one's heart. When I was a teenager, I realized that I wasn't feeling anything - because there was nothing to feel. I could open the door to my heart as long as I could and no one was entering.

Living in the Real World

The more Christians I talked to, the more I realized that they were living in some parallel word. They saw the meaning of life as to praise God. They saw their lives as meaningless and to get through as quickly but as comfortably as possible in order to get the good stuff in the afterlife. Why they didn't kill themselves was beyond me. Certainly they would have gotten to heaven faster that way. Ah, but suicide is a sin. How convenient.

In my life, I've experienced cruelty and abuse that would make your eyeballs melt. There is no justice and nothing in life is fair. Many people get away with their crimes because people cannot be bothered to pay attention to what is really going on around them. Everything is left in God's hands.

Well, God's doing a crap job of it. It's time we use our own intelligence and creativity to solve the problems on this planet in this lifetime, else meaningless suffering for all species will continue.

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