This Is How I Lost My Religion

I have always questioned religion. I was raised by a shaman (my father) who instilled in me a deeply spiritual upbringing. My mother, however, was brought up Catholic and put me in Catholic school, which I attended until the middle of sixth grade.

I was spoon-fed God before I was allowed to experience who I was or wanted to be. Immediately, I was conditioned into who God wanted me to be — who I was supposed to be. This wasn’t an enjoyable experience at all.

From the uniforms that prevented me from being free to wear what I wanted to the way, the entire system seemed fueled by money and control, using God as a frontman. Religion was like a meal I couldn’t digest, let alone swallow.

Too much of it didn’t make sense.

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I Started Asking Too Many Questions

Um, are you there God?

Why was there a man in the sky and why was he in sole control? Why was he being called my “father” when I already have one? If God was our “father”, then where was our mother?

I was being told to repeat the same incantation every day, “The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit”, but where were the daughters? Why are only men in charge? Where are the women? If Mary was the mother of Jesus, why wasn’t she included in the trio?

I mean, she did birth him, right?

Surely, the Holy Spirit could occupy one side of the sign of the cross, and Mary the other. Why were women forgotten in religion and appreciated in spirituality?

How can there be one God if we live in a multidimensional universe? Was the plan to trick a multidimensional universe into believing it is one-dimensional? Because then there would be a reason to manipulate us into believing that there’s only one God.

One God for one dimension.

A God that everyone believes is going to save them, teach them, and help them digest the conditioning being fed to them. Taking from us the ability to be divine, by replacing the sky with a man in the sky, named God.

Promoting our loss of self through the insistence that we have no inner power. How can we not have power when we are electric? And most important of all, is the government God?

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My Questions Were Treated Like Sins

It seemed like asking to understand God only created problems

The closer I got to the surfaces of the truths I wasn’t meant to find, the more aggressive the Catholic Church, as well as Christians, pushed back.

My questions were never answered.

God seemed to be guarded by this veil, and it only made me more curious. So, naturally, I developed even more questions. If we have all the answers we ever needed then… who exactly are we praying to?

If God was so loving why would he want me to fear him? There’s no healthy way to fear the people we love. How is that promoting a healthy relationship with God? And why exactly did he only give his words to men to relay?

Only men?

Speaking of men, why is God referred to as a ‘him’ when he has the gift of creation, specifically the creation of life? A gift exclusive to women, only.

Why would there be a commandment about ‘coveting thy neighbor’s wife’ but not thy neighbor’s husband? Why aren’t the rules fair and why are the consequence of not following them, destined to get us —

sent to hell
doomed to death
or fated to suffer in some way?

What’s with all the threats?

A true ruler doesn’t need threats to rule, he can command his (or her) respect without it. How can he be called a forgiving God if he’s sending people to hell for not doing what he wants when he created us with our own needs and ‘free will’?

It seemed like God was —

a man in charge
who governed all
told us what to do
and then punished us if we didn’t listen

He was starting to feel more like a strict parent or a tyrant that I wasn’t allowed to believe in. To me, religion was starting to sound too much like a government operation. So… was the government God?

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Unmasking The Face of God

Spirituality v. Religion

By the time I graduated college, I’d figured religion was, in fact, manufactured. It was like a script that had been sold to the masses, and we were all cast to play the role of blind believers.

I had been worshipping something greater than me and calling it ‘God’ when I didn’t really know what it was. Neither was I being allowed to know. I finally burnt out and decided that religion was the matrix’s off-brand version of spirituality. It was like the yang to the yin that began unmasking the face of God.

In this way, religion felt like a project, years in the making. Smoking weed, being nosey, and diving deeper into my father’s belief system got me to this point. I should mention we are Indigenous so spirituality is a major aspect of our culture,

Spirituality guided me, religion pushed me

Where spirituality desired for me to be my own creator, religion told me I had one. Where spirituality urged me to lead, religion told me to follow, blindly. Spirituality asked me to have faith. Religion told me to believe, or go to Hell.

Spirituality lead me toward understanding, religion confused me. Spirituality wanted me to dig deeper, and find the answers I needed. Religion wanted me to stop asking and just do as I was told, or go to Hell.

Where religion relies on God, spirituality relies on intuition. Spirituality offered me solutions — directly through me. Religion purposefully misguided me from correlations I was never supposed to be able to make.

But where religion withheld answers to my questions, spirituality offered many of them to me. Over time, I started picking apart religion and seeing it as less literal and more metaphorical. And you know what? Religion started making sense once I stopped seeing it as real.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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