🔒 The Freedom of Independent Spirituality: A Voyage Beyond Religious Fear

Hey there everybody. First of all, thanks for being a supporter, thanks for your financial support, thanks for sharing the podcast, thanks for listening and please continue to share with anybody who think might benefit from the podcast. Today's question comes from a listener and she wants to remain anonymous and she wanted to ask about overcoming the fear of religion from one's upbringing, and I want to say this topic is near and dear to my heart. I want to say this is very one. It's very important to me because of my personal story, which I'll share with you, that I went through growing up. I was raised in a traditional Pentecostal church traditional, I guess, from my perspective. My grandfather was the pastor. Interestingly enough, my grandfather was raised as a Methodist and both of his parents are Methodist, but he fell in with these holiness people and my grandfather taught what they taught, which was that there was original sin, that we were born into a world where we were basically enemies of God until we came to repent and to be baptized and speak in tongues and all that stuff, that there is an eternal heaven and an eternal hell, that it's a binary thing we go to one or the other, and that basically all other religions were false, including, in fact, other sex or other denominations of Christianity, which is really interesting, as I grew up and learned that there are somewhere between 30 and 40,000 denominations of Christianity, but I grew up believing that, for example, catholics weren't saved because Catholics weren't baptized the right way and didn't receive the Holy Spirit. So this was my background growing up and there's still a lot of fear in me what if we? What if I got it wrong? And this God that I was taught about was, frankly, very scary. And as a child, even though I was taught this in Sunday school by my Sunday school teachers, when I went to my parents to get baptized, they said I was too young to make the decision. So here I was thinking well, old enough to understand that I'm going to go to hell if I don't get baptized. But I wasn't old enough to get baptized and in fact I believe that's what manifested in me as migraines, that migraines when I was a child.

For the time I was, from when I was started school up until I was in my teen years I would get very sick, especially on the weekends, to the point of actually I would get nauseous from the migraines I had. And I believe it was because of the fear that I was carrying around, I couldn't sleep at night. There were nights I would stay awake all night long worrying about what was going to happen to me when I died and what happens if I die right now. Because they would say to me you know what happens if you die right now, or what if Jesus comes back. I was taught about a rapture, an imminent rapture that was going to happen at any moment, out of the blue, that Jesus could come back. And in fact I remember one day sitting in church and there was a guest pastor at our church and he decided that during the sermon I have someone go to the back of the church room I can't think of the word right now, but go to the back of the sanctuary and blow a trumpet, and it scared me to death. I was a child when this happened, so I had this fear that Jesus was going to come back literally at any moment and I could be caught off guard and even if I was baptized, if I was doing something that was sinful, like at the movies or playing cards that I might be lost forever. So I can definitely understand this feeling of fear that people carry around with them.

So the thing about a lot of religions and I'm going to be really frank here, but I do want to start by saying I have nothing against religion. I have nothing against religion that brings people hope and brings people love and brings people peace but the thing about a lot of religions is they're basically cults, and one of the things that cults do is they indoctrinate you. They tell you that everybody outside of your cult is there to deceive you. They're lying to you that really the only people who really understand you and love you are the ones that are inside and, by the way, they're going to tell you this. By the end of the day, they're going to tell you that what we're telling you is not true. And when they tell you that they're being deceived and they're trying to deceive you, so it's a way of inoculating you against from looking outside of your own faith. So there's a big difference between spiritual faith and institutionalized religion.

I think, in terms of spiritual faith, that's faith that you have, that's your own, that you make your own, that you find from your own exploration. Now, it's fine to listen to other people and to be inspired by others, but I think ultimately you have to trust yourself, which reminds me again of another thing. They told us that our hearts were evil. So don't trust your own heart, lean not on your own understanding, precious like that, to say listen to us rather than listen to yourself. So these pressures are very real and these pressures are very strong and some families will go so far as to say, if you break outside of our faith, if you abandon our faith, we're going to abandon you because you're an unbeliever. Now You're basically unclean. So I encourage people.

There's a group that I used to listen to a lot of Christian music. There's a group I really love and they're called Church of Rhythm and they have a song called Faith. I want to read the lyrics to you because it's interesting. I was listening back when I was in the cult, let's say, but now I'm listening to it from a whole different perspective and it goes my faith is my own. Popularity is the great dictator, with the masses to please. I don't want to be king for a day. If I have to give up what I can and cannot say, I will never go back to the way that I was. I will never turn my back on my God. My faith is my own, my cynics heart caged in, I shut the door so there's nothing left to believe in. I can't see if I follow blind and I can't speak unless I can hear my voice. Too long I played this game of Simon, says my second hand faith. I will make it mine and I will not follow blind, and that's what I encourage people to do. Don't follow anyone or anything blindly, including me. Anything that I'd say I encourage you to check out on your own.

Now the thing is, as I was saying earlier, guilt can be used in religious contexts to keep us hemmed in, to tell us that if you stray then you're a non-believer. If you're stray then you're being deceived. If you're stray then you're being led away by the devil, and that's the way of keeping you from doing your own exploration and seeking on your own Even the fact of. I remember when I first started exploring other religions and reading other religious texts. I felt a little bit guilty because I was told that these other religions fell short, that these people were deceived, and I felt like maybe I shouldn't be doing that. But I want to encourage you to explore other faiths. In any faith that tells you you can't explore, you have to wonder how strong that faith really is. So acknowledge your own feelings and your own beliefs. Acknowledge your own heart.

If something doesn't make sense to you, if something makes God seem like a monster, then it's okay to question that. It's okay to say you know, does this make sense to me? Does it make sense that God would be this way? Understand that there are other religious texts. Understand that people read religious texts differently. When I first started really exploring, I came across something called Christian Universalism, which said that there that no one goes to hell eternally, the God saves everyone. And they read the same Bible that I read growing up. They just read it differently. I understood that Catholics read the Bible differently and people of other faiths read the Bible differently. So even if you're looking at the same text, people might read it differently.

So I encourage also to explore other religions and find out. Do they make sense to you? You know they. They're not all going to make all sense to you. There are some things about every faith that doesn't make sense. I would think to some degree, but you'll find out. There's a lot of overlap. Encourage you to find community, find like-minded people, to find people who explore, to find people who say it's okay to ask questions. No one should be fearful of you just asking questions.

I encourage you to get trauma. If the if the trauma is deep-seated, you know, get therapy. I went to therapy. I went to therapy. I was in my 30s, I believe, maybe early 40s, and it got to the point where I was having panic attacks. All the time. I felt terrible, all the time. I felt really bad about myself, I felt awful and I went to seek therapy. Now, interestingly enough, I knew that, from where I was coming from, that I need to see a religious therapist. So I actually saw a Christian counselor and she helped me quite a bit. And that's when I actually said to kind of discover Christian universalism but seek a counselor whether it's a therapist, whether it's a life coach or a guide or something like that but no, get help, talk to someone that can help you get over the guilt.

So what I want to say also it's important to be compassionate, and compassionate to yourself and compassionate to your family members. Because, again, as you start to break free of this, you might find people who are scared. They're scared for you, but they're also scared themselves. Frankly, they're scared what if my beliefs aren't right and they and people like would like to surround ourselves with like beliefs. So as you start to move away from the beliefs of your youth, you might find people trying to draw you back and you might find them even not accepting you and maybe even rejecting you from coming to family events or whatever. Understand that everybody is on their own spiritual journey. Understand that everybody is on their own path and they're gonna have to find the truth in their time.

As I left by the faith of my youth, I was concerned about how my family members were reacting. For the most part, they reacted pretty well. What I've also seen is that some of them have come along in a different timeline than I have. Let's say that maybe years after I said this doesn't make sense, they start saying it doesn't make sense to them either. So I understand that we're all on a path, that none of us is perfect, that we all have still things to learn and we all still need to grow.

So, in conclusion, I want to just say to you, when it comes to overcoming this fear, think about who you think God really is and think about even in the religions that tell us that God is going to send people to hell. They also tell us that God is love. They also tell us that God is compassionate, which is a lesson I've learned from everything I've studied inside and outside of religion. It's a lesson that near-death experiences tell us. These are lessons that mediums tell us that God is compassionate. So if God is compassionate, god's not going to condemn you for asking questions. God's not going to condemn you for exploring different things. So if you are again stuck in some of these religions, there are a ton of resources out there.

I remember when I was wrestling with the idea of homosexuality in the church and what did God really say about that? I found a great book called what Does the Bible Really Say About Homosexuality, by a guy named Daniel Hemeniac, who was a Catholic priest who happened to be gay. I wrote a book about is it okay to call God mother by a pastor named Paul Smith, when I was struggling with does God send people to hell. There's a book by a gentleman named Thomas Talbot and it's called the Inescapable Love of God. That's helped me that God is more loving than we can imagine. When I was wrestling with the idea of a seven-day creation because I was a young earth person I thought that their earth was created in seven days and I read a book about that.

So there's a ton of things out there that can answer your questions in terms of your religion and even, again, exploring outside of your religion. So if you have any questions about this, feel free to reach out to me and let me know what your questions are. I can turn you on to some other resources, but also, again, try to reach out to a compassionate community or friends that will listen to you as you ask your questions. There's so much out there now, so much more than was when I was going through it, so get help if you need that. Thanks for listening. Let me know if you have any questions you want me to answer on the next episode. Have a wonderful day.