Member-only story
Why I’m No Longer Religious
My family is religious. Not the casual kind of religious where they go to church once in a blue moon and pray over the food, but the critical, life-changing kind. Their bibles are full of highlighted text and cramped annotations scrawled in the margins.
My parents pray daily, and they always consult God before making big decisions. To them, God is the most important aspect of their lives, and they love him with a ferocity and dedication I’ll never understand.
My parents taught me about the world through the lens of a Christian perspective — I viewed science and nature as works of God, not the result of evolution. Even my own life was temporary — my time here on earth was for the sole purpose of serving God and spreading his message.
Of all things in life, God’s existence was absolute — an undeniable fact. For all my hard work, my reward would be an eternity in heaven: this mystical, magical place with gold corridors and singing angels.
My dad used to be a pastor, and from the age of eight to thirteen, I was the “pastor’s kid”. I could recite the worship songs by memory, and I knew all the Bible stories by heart. There were slogans that I often heard from my parents that I parroted to other people:
