The opiate of the masses…

This post is part two of a series on Losing My Religion. You can find part one here.

Religion is man-made, but faith is divine.

That was the motto that I held onto for about 7 years when I was transitioning out of religion. Because walking away from religion isn’t like quitting a job. I left religion so I could commune with the divine energy of the universe.

When you have been born and raised into something, and the culture of that cult has permeated every single aspect of your life, then you have to literally deconstruct every single thing you think is true.

That’s why it’s called “Deconstruction” after all.

If you have no intentions of deconstructing and are totally happy in your faith, this is your warning to stop reading. Because if you continue and then begin to question it… I’m not responsible. K?

There are so many tiny ways that the church controls its congregations that it will literally make your head spin. I swear, it feels like a million tiny micro-messages that all cultivate to tell you one over-arching lesson:

You are not, nor will you ever be, good enough to deserve the glory of god.

Which is a pile of bullmalarkey. But see, they are selling you a version of heaven. One that you can only reach if you do very specific things a very specific way. And doing those things will mean that you get your rewards in the afterlife.

As I stumbled through religion for over 30 years, I will tell you… the goal post is always moving. When they feel like they have dragged the congregation too close to the finish line and they feel like they are doing the right thing… BAM! Here’s another way you fall short of the glory of god.

They do this with carefully selected bible verses, usually taken completely out of context, even if it is about 1700 years since it was written.

Just for perspective, The Odyssey and The Iliad are older than the Bible, yet we don’t use lessons from the Percy Jackson series today as a way to judge other humans.

Yep, they’re older than the bible. By several hundred years, in fact.

And the seven deadly sins? Greed, lust, pride, envy, gluttony, wrath, and laziness? The concept of those stem from the Greek classics. I always thought it was the other way around – that Homer took them from the Bible. Knowledge is power, my friend.

To figure out how this one book has impacted society on such a grand scale, you have to look back and how it began and why it was marketed to be the “answer” in the first place.

Because as my mentor, the late, great Dr. Larry Nelson would say “Good history is intellectual history.”

The dark history of the Bible

When you begin to dig into the history of the bible and you learn that the books were not written by the folks like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, or Paul… you learn instead they are written off the teachings of those folks.

Did you ever play the game “Telephone” when you were in school? Essentially the teacher puts all the students in one big circle. The teacher leans over and whispers a simple sentence into the ear of one of the children next to her. That child leans over and whispers it to the child next to them, then that child relays the message… all the way back around to the teacher.

The catch is… you can only say it once. So no repeating or clarifying. By the time the message makes it back to the teacher, it is a completely different sentence that has zero resemblence to the one she told the first student.

If the Bible was written 400 years after these folks lived… and let’s just say that humans created new generations every twenty years (honestly, it was much faster), then around 20 generations of humans passed those stories before they were officially written down. Can you remember the stories from your great grandparents in much detail? I sure can’t.

And much like the media today, folks in the era of writing stuff down had an agenda, too. This is why not all of the “holy texts” made the cut to be in the Bible. Because some of those books did not fit the agenda of the reason the book was created in the first place. They contradicted the story rulers wanted to be told to use as a rule of law. So those books were simply omitted in favor of those which followed the plan of the guy with the purse strings.

Who was in charge of marketing?

Ok… so now we have a book that was a telephone-game version of stories that were told by folks who had been dead for far longer than the United States has existed. Can you even imagine trying to force folks to adhere to laws written 200 years ago? Let alone 400?

I mean… not to go off on a tangent… but women have only gotten the right to have their own bank accounts and credit cards in the United States in my OWN lifetime. Yes. I’m only 50. But I digress…

So how in the world did someone coerce folks who were connecting with nature and living in sync with the energy of the universe to believe in an imaginary all-powerful god?

Well that would be an all-powerful ruler of the time – Constantine.

Constantine was the ruler of the Roman Empire, and he was delusional enough to believe that he was chosen by god to expand the empire and… ya know…. steal their land, residents, the taxes they paid and take the wealth of whatever kingdoms he could overthrow. So that he could bring them “closer to god.”

So Con-man decides to send his mama, Helena, on a big quest to go find the cross that Jesus died on. Helena roams around for awhile and then is like “OH! Here it is! I found a chunk of wood and it’s the one I’m looking for because I say it’s the one I am looking for and I gave birth to the chosen one and so…. my word is all you need.” Cooooool?

There was no carbon dating or DNA testing… or ya know… modern stuff. We just had to take her word. About a cross that is completely historically inaccurate of what was actually used at the time of Christ.

Around this same time, Constantine wooed the Council of Nicea to basically hand pick the books of the Bible. Technically speaking, it was Athanasius the bishop of Alexandria, but he was on Constantine’s payroll. Kinda like how the churches lobby the government today, but in reverse. The whole “church and state” issue definitely goes back a long way.

In doing that, he essentially reshaped what is now known as the Catholic church and his edit of the Bible would later become the holy text for all of christianity, including the protestants after Martin Luther nailed up his theses.

The Con-man’s first goal was to make persecuting christians illegal. Good. We like that. No one should be persecuted for what they believe as long as it’s not hurting anybody. But his second was to get all the folks all over his land to convert to his flavor of the revamped religion.

I mean, in all fairness, Helena was also a christian and he learned to follow this in childhood. But all grown up, he basically had mommy issues and wanted to impress her so much that he just took it to the extreme. Know what I mean?

He wasn’t the first guy in history to use a religion to prove his masculinity, and he certainly would not be the last. But he was the first that had a major impact on the Bible we know today. Which goes through a few changes over the centuries.

Later, like King James decided he was gonna redo the Bible to suit his needs. So he commissioned a remix of the holy book so that he could have what he wanted… and omit what he didn’t. Ya know, to fit his rules and his agenda. And that’s how we get the King James Version. He did break away from the Catholic church, though. He honestly wasn’t really religious, he just used religion for his agenda to fill his coffers and behead the wives he was tired of. If he was alive today, sounds a lot like a TV preacher, no?

When women became wicked

Ever notice in some religions, that women are always getting the short end of the stick?

In the beginning, everything is blamed on Eve. Listen… that whole two folks populated the whole world thing is a different conversation… but that is literally the beginning.

But Adam said she went first, so she gets the blame for eating the forbidden fruit. I know you might think “oh yeah! the apple!” but the Bible never says it was an apple. That was renaissance era painters depicting the scene literally a thousand years after the bible was cobbled together. PS – it was most likely, according to Jewish scholars, a pomegranate.

See, our perception of society and art that surround the bible but don’t actually have anything to do with it whatsoever are part of the problem, too. Because the imagery in our head – especially as white folks – is almost 100% of the time dead wrong. If Jesus existed, he was absolutely a person of color. But let’s move on.

Modern church uses passages that are so specifically chosen to control women and keep them at a lower social status within their cult. Most major religions do not allow women to be the pastor/preist, they cannot serve on a board or have any input into the business side of the church (like a deacon) and are essentially told to be submissive to their husbands.

That’ll be a no from me, thank you.

I saw the domino effect of a grandmother who had been abused so severely that it eventually led to her death at 46 years old. I watched my own mama go through years of mental and emotional abuse.

So… as for me and my daughters? We are strong, independent women. Thank you very much.

But here’s the thing – the Bible doesn’t REALLY portray women as evil. Bible scholars tend to agree that contextually the Bible says that man and woman are equals. While some churches have finally adopted this way of thinking, Southern Baptist and Catholic churches definitely have not. And they’re not the only ones.

I very much believe this is a power struggle because women are so innately gifted to commune with nature, learn to heal themselves and those around them, converse with the energy of the universe and women like that don’t generally like being told what to do by a man. And men who gave them a really hard time often found themselves with a little dash of Aqua Tofana for their troubles.

But time and time again throughout the bible, if a woman doesn’t listen to a man, she’s a trouble maker and is made to be an example. So the church perpetuates this by continuing the degradation of women to this very day. It is how they keep them from being whole from within and tap into their own magic.

Yeah… I know this is a very Drunk History kinda version… but you get the point.

The church uses the Bible to control the masses. To keep them full of guilt, shame and self-loathing. To assert and maintain control plus line their pockets with tithing funds.

And in doing so it keeps the masses exhausted and overwhelmed so they simply don’t have the time or energy to question the system. But it does cause real issues and trauma for those subjected to it.

From my own personal experience, this is some of my trauma:

• As an 8 year old, I remember having a series of very vivid nightmares about how I was burning in hell every night for months on end. And I was told it was because I had done something to repent for.
• I was anxious that I was constantly being watched by an imaginary figure who was taking a list of all my wrong doings so that they could use it against me to cast me into hell.
• The teachings of the church led to shame about my own body. Plus the overabundance of conversations about how important virginity was to a man. Like seriously – it was drilled into us so much that I thought sex was the only thing a man wanted from a woman. And that lingered with me until my late 20s.
• An overarching feeling of guilt and shame over every tiny thing. Every thought, every action. To this day when I have anxiety about something and I cannot pin point it, often it traces back to something from church.
• I would try to be productive every moment of every day so I didn’t fall victim to sloth. This is still prevalent in how they pressure women to perform so much free labor for the church. It keeps them exhausted and overwhelmed so they simply don’t have the time or energy to question the system.
• Money issues galore. If you are too poor, you’re seen as lazy, as a charity case. Make too much money and you can feel guilty because of the whole “money is the root of all evil.” (Which is often mis-quoted by the way.)

I could write an entire encyclopedia of ways the church has created trauma – I gotta lotta layers that I’ve peeled off over time, and many more to go.

Was it worth it? Absolutely!

Deconstructing my religion has allowed me realize that I was never evil or wicked and was always enough. To authentically step into who I am – a practicing witch who is fully out of the broom closet.

Why did we ever hide to begin with? Let’s talk about that tomorrow, shall we?