I could easily write an entire book about my bad experiences with Christianity, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to try to do you all a favor and do my best to focus on what was my “last straw” experience—so here it goes. My husband and I found out that Jesus was not an actual historical character about three years ago when we read The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S., which was the inspiration for us to scour the internet for hours every day for 3 or 4 months afterwards looking for as much evidence as we could find, both pro and con, for the historicity of Jesus.

Conclusion: Proof that Jesus was an actual person--slim to none. Proof that Jesus is actually a fictional character--way, way, more than enough.

We had been very Christian for 15 years before that, and I was so crazy at one point that the only channel I would watch on TV was EWTN [this lasted for at least a full year], I prayed the entire 15 decades of the rosary every day, which took at least an hour, and I received communion over 100 days in a row once, as well as performing a large, varied assortment of other pointless acts.

It took quite a while for reality to completely sink in, due to the fact that I’d brainwashed myself so thoroughly, and even though I knew that it really wasn’t true anymore, I continued to go to church anyway [stupid!]—probably because I’m a housewife who lives way out in the country and I thought going to church was the only way I was going to have any “social life” at all. I was also addicted to going out and being seen, and being dressed up [I know how vain that sounds] and being considered one of the “important people” in the church.

Our experiences at the Catholic church that we were going to were so bad that we couldn’t stand it anymore anyway, so instead of having any frigging sense, I dragged my husband to the Baptist church where the dental hygienist who cleaned our teeth went, whose husband happened to be the pastor.

We had been having our teeth cleaned by this woman for at least 5 years [I was still Christian when I met her] and even though my first impression of her was that she was a little “off”, like flaky, after spending 45 minutes listening to her without being able to say a whole lot back every 6 months made a real bond, particularly because I had no other close women friends. She spoke with an unusually kind, gentle, slow voice that initially I found somewhat amusing because it seemed so unreal.

It was like she was just floating along on a cloud--and like she was playing a part, not really being herself--I thought “Oh, this is what she does to get people to relax while she cleans their teeth, she talks to them like they’re children”.

Eventually, though, this first impression went away and I gradually became what I now consider hypnotized by her, drawn into her airy, childlike, Jesus-is-guiding-my-life-and-it’s-so-wonderful world—this was compounded by her attitude--like she was just perfectly enchanted with me.

Every time I showed up to have my teeth cleaned she would hug me and then, beaming, go on about how great it was to see me and have the chance to talk with me, and act as if seeing me was the high point of her week—I had an extremely cold mother and older sister, and this sort of thing touched my heart to an inordinate degree—I soon totally lost my ability to see her objectively.

By the time I left the dentist’s office I would always feel like she had to be one of the nicest people on earth, and I felt like I owed her, at the very least, the very same level of affection she was showing for me—if someone makes me feel like they really value having a relationship with me, I go out of my way to respond in kind. Considering the sort of home I grew up in, I was completely starved for this stuff.

I told her about my life—how I had always been placed squarely at the bottom of the social totem pole at school, work, or wherever [which is most likely due to pretty extreme parental neglect, and severe jealousy-inspired sibling abuse]—I’ve had the kind of life that has given me an excellent view of the absolutely worst side of human nature. My life has been nightmarishly emotionally painful and humiliating [I wish this was an exaggeration], and I’m sure there’ve been people in less pain who have succeeded in killing themselves.

She told me a lot of very personal information--everything from her husband’s anger problem and poor business decisions, to her youthful indiscretions with men that had lasted well into her 30’s, as well as the fact that her and her other church friends tell everyone that they go on a spiritual weekend retreat every year but actually go out to an isolated cabin and get blind drunk instead.

I was a little shocked by what she said, but not much—I grew up in the 70’s, too and was not unfamiliar with either drugs or sex, but hadn’t gone as far into it as she had, so I basically understood—even though I was done with that lifestyle, I could see why someone who had as many responsibilities as she did would need to let their hair down periodically.

This made me feel like she really trusted me, like she could tell that I was--I don’t know—more sensitive than average, or maybe more understanding from having had a pretty rough life myself, and that this was what made her feel comfortable enough with me to really share herself. She made me feel like I was very special to her—she used my name every few sentences like she loved the sound of it—like she loved me.

This made me feel totally obligated to her—here was someone, a woman, no less, who for the first time in my life seemed to genuinely appreciate me, and even seemed to be impressed with my personality enough to confide these unflattering things to me—I was totally disarmed. I would have bet my bottom dollar that this woman was an extremely loving, caring, concerned person without the slightest bad intention whatsoever—a veritable angel on earth.

I was also just as certain that I was very important to her, that she truly valued our relationship and that she saw me as a very special person. I thought of her as my best female friend, and even though we never talked or met outside the dentist’s office [I’m well aware of how dumb and desperate this makes me look], I never thought for one single second that she didn’t sincerely care about me, or had any ulterior motives whatsoever.

This was why, even though I could go on for a half an hour with anyone I met at that time about why I was completely fed up with the Catholic church [one gruff nasty priest, followed by another after he retired that was an immature ego-tripper who was a real expert at working up, using, and sadistically discarding naïve women, one of whom had a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized, and had to go on anti-psychotic medication after he did a number on her, among other things], I felt like it wouldn’t be right not to give the church of my good friend a try.

I thought the Baptist church would have to be better—no Pope, no you-can’t-criticize-the-priest crap—way more democratic, and saner. Plus my angel would be there--the only woman I had ever met that actually seemed to love me.

As soon as we joined I noticed a difference in the way she treated me—very little eye contact, little warmth, and what seemed like her trying to avoid my husband and I—we could be standing by the door after church and she would just cruise right by us with her eyes straight ahead, even though we were like 2 feet away from her, with no one else even in the vicinity.

She could be eating at the same table with us and 4 or 5 other people and talk at length with everyone else there, initiating conversation with all of them—and we would patiently wait for her to get around to saying something to us [I really didn’t want to make her feel like I was trying to “latch on” to her in any way, just in case that was the problem, so I would just let her get around to talking to us], but she would just finish her dinner and get up and leave.

She actually crossed a street once just so she wouldn’t have to speak to us or acknowledge our presence--it was pretty obvious. I had no idea what had gone wrong—she didn’t appear to be mad at me, it seemed more like she felt like it was beneath her to appear to even know me, even though when we joined the church we got up in front of everyone and told the whole congregation that she was the reason we joined, because she was such a wonderful, loving person—everyone knew we gave her all the credit.

We couldn’t figure out what it was—eventually I decided that she must be just testing me to see if I was really worthy of her friendship, but I still wondered why she had seemed so enthusiastic before, and why she would need to test me now—it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

It didn’t occur to me for quite a while that maybe she thought I knew too much about her personal life—if I had ever anticipated that this would make her not want me at her church I would never have ended up going there—I also realized that she had never actually invited us to join the church—that was one of the things I had really liked about her, that she didn’t seem at all pushy—I had just inferred it, I guess, that she would want us there, after 5 years of being so over-the-top friendly to us.

I was such a groveling weenie for this woman that I tried to get her to like me again by getting more involved in the church—I would help her shoulder her responsibilities, and show her that I cared enough to contribute to her and her husband’s vision for their church—I was going to show her that I could put my money where my mouth was, and that I wasn’t just taking her friendship for granted, if that was what she was worried about.

I joined the choir, and then started helping the older ladies in the kitchen [it really helped that she was ignoring me during the Wednesday night dinners—I went into the kitchen to get someone to talk to me] and started making dinner for 40 or so people once a month and helping to serve and clean up every week. I’m not a strong person physically--I had a disease when I was 6 that set me back for life—I get tired easily and have about as much available energy as a 70-year-old even though I’m in my late 40’s.

It would take the whole next day after these dinners for me to recover—I really hustled and the ladies always had to tell me that I had done more than my fair share so I could leave and that they would finish up.

She would come into the kitchen and not even look at me most of the time—I felt like I couldn’t make her happy with me or want to have something to do with me no matter how hard I tried. Finally she actually managed a weak little smile at me after months of me working in the kitchen—it seemed as if I had finally found my proper place in her life--as a cook and scullery maid.

Eventually, I got so sick with the flu by running myself down at church that I literally almost died—I was extremely sick for months and still haven’t fully recovered--this was just what I needed to see things in perspective. Being away from it all for a couple of months cleared my head enough so that I could finally start to see what had really happened, and who this woman really was.

She was actually a phony manipulator [duh] that knew exactly how to act to get people to join their church—all she had to do is act like she was all bowled over emotionally by anyone that came into her life who seemed lonely, fragile, odd, a misfit or whatever [I’m sure a lot of you if you met me would think I fit into one or all of these categories].

After these people joined, she knew that if she treated them coolly, like they had to prove themselves worthy, that they would, like most weenie, I-need-to-please-Mommy types, try to figure out what she wanted—I used to bounce around that kitchen like a panicked trained monkey—it was pathetic.

One of the things I hadn’t noticed about her until I joined the church was how totally un-spontaneous she was—ever word, every movement, was always carefully measured and considered—like she was in a play or a trance—very calculated. She also walked around like a queen—her whole demeanor was haughty, and she would often tilt her head back when she talked to people and make her eyes real big—I guess that’s where the term “looking down your nose” comes from—the whole effect was creepy.

She always spoke very slowly and gently—it had the effect of making you feel like she was perfectly harmless, but slightly patronizing--like she was the “Mother” and the rest of the congregation were her children. Everyone treated her like she had just come straight down from heaven—like her whole “too holy to even touch the ground” routine was the real thing. It’s no wonder I fell for it—everyone else there seemed to have fallen for it, too. I would have liked to have talked to someone else who she’d played like she played me, but they’d probably already left.

From what I could gather from hearing her talk to the other parishioners, her main focus was to do things that would put the church in the forefront of our town and make it look cutting-edge Christian—she was constantly trying to get something novel going to attract new members. She was, from what I can remember, almost always trying to get someone to work on her latest pet project that would improve or maintain the status of their church.

In this part of Texas pastors and their wives are a kind of royalty, and this woman’s whole mission is to be “somebody”--no matter what it takes or who gets hurt. It takes a lot of people to do “Jesus’s” work—I think that people like this have no idea that the “Holy Spirit” they feel is empowering their lives is actually a delusional ego trip that gets it’s legitimacy from it’s association, in these people’s minds, with God’s will.

What a recipe for making someone into a pathological user who can’t even see what kind of fallout is going on in the lives of the people around them who are knocking themselves out doing things for the church—the ones that are naïve enough to think that these people are actually sincere and have everyone’s good interests at heart.

You shouldn’t have to worry that someone like this who’s a Christian can make you feel so obligated through feigned affection that you give them more money than you can really afford, wrack your brain trying to figure out what they want from you, and then work yourself sick until you almost die “in the service of God”-- in THEIR church that’s no more than a stage for them to promote themselves on.

You should have seen the women in poor health in their 70’s who were struggling to make and serve those dinners every week, and the old men who would do the lawn of the Catholic church in the hot sun in the summer—it was sickening. If you told most of the people around here that you think all Christian denominations are cults and that no matter what church you go to, the people there are so delusional that knowing them will make you crazy, too--they would probably run you out of town.

Here’s my idea of what’s really going on—I think evil is real—and that religion in general isn’t on the right side—Satanism and Christianity look like they’re in opposition, but the truth is that it’s like good cop/bad cop.

You get hurt by evil, so you go running to Jesus—then after a while you realize that following this convoluted ideology sucks all the joy out of your life and leaves you in a state of suspended adolescence, and you think, “Oh, I really need to live”, so you do drugs and/or drink, have sex with people that you’d have done better to have never met, screw up your life and feel like something that crawled out of the gutter—and then you make your same old stupid, unimaginative way back to the church—it’s nothing but a vicious circle.

In church there are 3 kinds of people—the first, which is the majority, are the naïve people who are so harmless themselves, and so trusting, that they make perfect victims for the 2nd and 3rd types—the 2nd type being the garden-variety users and manipulative phonies who scam the good, trusting folks into helping them with their projects that are designed to impress the rest of the congregation, and then, last, and certainly worst, there are the flat-out, down-right certifiable sociopaths who are usually at or near the top.

They could be the priest [I told you about the one we had here], or the pastor, or the pastor’s wife, or a deacon, or the leader of the choir, or the president of the Altar Society, etc.—both of the churches I went to had at least 3 of these people apiece—they mesmerize and control other people with what seems to me to be a supernatural ability—their lack of conscience makes them ready-made puppets for evil influences that are looking for power—that’s why these people are attracted to church and/or ordination in the first place.

Nothing makes a better home for spiritual manipulation and evil than a church. Nothing hides evil better than the premise of sanctity, and since pointing it out to the majority of the nicer people in the church that one of these gems is actually a user is such a spiritual no-no, you soon realize that there isn’t one thing you can say about these people without making yourself look bad. You’re not supposed to judge anyone, especially in church--God forbid that a troublemaker like you would point something out that anyone who wasn’t in a state of self-hypnosis could easily see.

It really seems to be absolutely essential to the “spiritual” ambiance of the church that no one ever break the spell by making something other than positive observations about anyone in the church. No wonder sociopaths find this kind of set-up so irresistible.

It’s so comforting to know that there’s always a church near you that really needs your involvement. It seems that the majority of the people who go to church are just too well-adjusted or have too much self-esteem to feel the necessary degree of obligation to work on the many, many things that need to be done in order for the endless dinners, festivals, rummage sales and what-have-yous to be a success—losers can finally find a place in society where they’re not only welcomed and accepted, but they’re downright essential.

If you start to perceive that the people you’re working with [or more accurately, for] really see you as more of an employee than a dear, beloved friend, though, you’d really be better off keeping this observation to yourself--that is, if you don’t want to be the spoil-sport that ruins the lovely atmosphere. You might risk losing all of your good friends—you know, the ones who will stick by you no matter what, unless you disqualify yourself from this life-long devotion by making the observation that the leader of the project is solely motivated by ego or are either subtly or overtly abusive.

I had this happen to me over and over again—I would get set up by someone that I thought actually wanted to be friends with me [a manipulative user or a sociopath], do a bunch of work for them while making friends with the nicer people in the church who were also working on the same project, then gradually perceive that the person who had initially gotten me into the thing was just using me [and everyone else], communicate this observation to the other dupes, and then get treated by everyone like I was the one who was the jerk—I’m like the all-time poster child for this.

It makes you angry at every one of them afterwards, of course mostly at the person who persuaded you into thinking they actually needed your friendship who conned you into getting involved with the thing in the first place, and then at the rest of the people you worked with who didn’t care if the person was a user or not, because, after all, they said they were doing it all for the “Glory of God”, so it didn’t matter if their real motivation was totally wrong.

I still don’t understand how this pat declaration is all it takes to make it right, or how a person can serve their own ego while simultaneously doing it all for the glory of God. Then there are the people who are so mesmerized, brainwashed or stupid [take your pick] that they honestly can’t relate to what you’re telling them about the ego-aggrandizing leader, and afterwards get visibly disturbed whenever they see you, because you’ve truly shocked them with this startlingly new [and what seems to them so unnecessarily negative] information.

Even though I said I’d keep this to my “last straw” experience, I really feel like I need to share what was the perfect example of this particular scenario—I met a woman who was new to the Catholic Church that wanted someone to help her make a quilt to raffle off at the Fall Festival.

She made it seem at first like making the quilt was an excuse for me to go over her house every week for a few hours so we could hang out together and become friends—but then after she got mad at me one day because I wasn’t working fast enough for her liking [I was working as fast as I could without messing it up], I realized that she actually saw me as an employee and that our “friendship” was just an excuse for me to help her with the quilt. If I had even the slightest bit of healthy self-esteem I would have stopped dealing with her that day—but I didn’t.

I never could tell whether she liked me or not—I have since realized if someone makes you feel like this, then they don’t. She invited me to help out with the choir for the Easter extravaganza, so I joined--I kept on going after the holiday was over because I felt like I had such a sweet, cozy relationship with the other women in the choir. She started to make us learn more and more music until we were practicing for at least 3 hours a week and had to listen to CD’s she’d made with even more music at home in order to learn everything she wanted us to sing.

The way I handled it was to actually learn the music—I felt like the rest of the congregation deserved to hear a decent rendition of all of these songs, since we [the choir] were standing in front of microphones—and that it was bad enough that they couldn’t sing along with 80% of it because she insisted on us singing so much new stuff that no one had even heard most of it before.

The way that the other women [one my age and the rest 10 to 30 years older] handled it was to treat it like it was all just for fun, and so they would only bother to get a really basic, rough idea of how it should sound, often being totally lost during songs that had different parts for alto, soprano, 2nd soprano, etc.

It was hard enough trying to memorize your own part without the women standing next to you on either side missing their cues of where to come in, or being completely off-key because they hadn’t bothered to learn their part in the first place. This was probably because they had actual lives to live and didn’t want to waste their time trying to learn all the music, but still couldn’t resist being on stage every week regardless of how sloppy it sounded.

I couldn’t believe it when, after we had just butchered another song she had rushed us to learn, and made the rest of the congregation suffer through it, that the other women in the choir would say things to each other like “I think we sounded pretty good today, don’t you?”—it was bizarre. I can’t believe I thought I needed friends this badly—it was insane. I was addicted to being seen, heard, and noticed to such an inordinate degree that it was impossible for me to be rational and see how unnecessary all this was.

At first I just said things like “Maybe we should sing more stuff that everyone in the congregation knows so that they can sing along”—but the leader would say something like “Why does that matter—they don’t care if they can sing along or not”—and the other choir members would just sit there silently.

I would say that it was their church, too, and that they were entitled to be able to participate in it—one of the women agreed with me privately about this, but would never agree with me when we were all there together.

Finally, after mass one Sunday, I really couldn’t stand it anymore, and I made the radical comment that I thought that we needed to reduce the amount of new music we were learning in order to sing it properly—either that or we were going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time practicing, and that I thought that we were spending more than enough time on it already.

The choir leader, leaning over me with her eyes bulging, shaking and fighting back tears, said that only someone who was stupid wouldn’t be able to learn all of the music and that if I was actually doing this for the glory of God [like she was] that no sacrifice would be too great.

I told her that I couldn’t see how doing a half-baked job every week was any real glory to God, and that the other members of the congregation deserved better than to having to sit there and listen to it. I also made the comment that they had the right to be able to sing along with most of the music being sung in their own church, just like they had been for decades before she got there.

I was glad that there were two other women there to see her like this, and I thought “Now they can see for themselves how crazily ambitious and emotionally skewed she really is”—but neither of them said anything in agreement with me at the time, and afterwards when she was gone they acted like they found her reaction acceptably normal and that I was the one who had upset the apple cart.

As far as I know, this cow and her herd are still irritating the rest of the congregation with a veritable smorgasbord of badly-sung and unrecognizable music. It was obvious [at least it was to me] that all she wanted was to “wow” the rest of the congregation with the sheer amount of complicated and/or new music she could get us to sing, and that she was so obtuse and obsessed with being “someone” in the church that she couldn’t see that it’s not impressive if it sounds like we only just first heard it 5 minutes before the mass started.

Her husband had actually insisted that they live way out in the boonies in a tiny town 40-50 miles away from any Catholic church because everywhere else they had lived she would spend all her weekdays at church, from morning till night, doing anything to keep busy, while her house and physical appearance went by the wayside.

She wouldn’t unpack her boxes of sheet music, banners, decorations and other years worth of accumulated church paraphernalia and left it all piled up in the corner of the living room of their new home, as if to say to her husband—“This was, and is, my whole life--and you can’t stop me”—and he couldn’t—when I left the church she was totally into it to the exclusion of everything else in her life.

I think people lose their identities when they’re Christian, and that they lose them in direct proportion to how seriously they take it or how involved they are in it—the less crazy Christians take it casually and don’t get very involved, and the more crazy ones [like I was] totally try to believe it, live for Jesus, devote their whole lives to the church, the whole nine yards.

A lot of them end up in what seems like an hypnotic trance, and it’s almost impossible for them to see what is actually going on right in front of them—they don’t see negative facial expressions or hear unpleasant tones of voice—they’re truly in la-la land. I think the choir leader would have had to have thrown me over the balcony for the rest of the choir to see that she wasn’t quite right in the head.

They also have a hard time absorbing any new information—it’s like there’s a wall around their minds that new information is bouncing off of. It was a real challenge, in church-related social situations, to try to figure out what I could say to people that could possibly fit into the narrow little parameters of what they would find to be acceptable ideas or activities. It’s strange to me that anyone would say that they feel “empowered” by their belief in Christianity.

I never saw a bunch of people more frightened by anything even slightly unusual in my life—they’re like people who’re afraid to leave their yard and go down the street, or to the store, or to the beach—it’s like mental agoraphobia. Now that I know that the basis for it is totally fictional, I see how tragic it is that people think that bonsai-ing their minds in this way is the only way they can prove their love of God—it’s really terrible.

There’s something truly supernatural going on here—but it isn’t good. There’s a reason why so many of the testimonies people share on this site tell of there being, initially, extremely positive feelings that go along with their Jesus trip—then they usually relate that they spend years trying to regain these feelings, and end up recriminating themselves for “losing” God’s grace.

This is exactly what happens when someone gets involved with a sociopath--they feel great at first, on top of the world—then this euphoria fades away and all they’re left with is a feeling of depression and bondage. I think there is a God, and that God is good—and that religion uses God as it’s bait to get well-meaning people to serve it.

I think that this power that uses religion is psychically and spiritually negative and that it somehow makes people serve it by destroying their individuality and taking them over, thereby making them into little more than robots—this is just my personal opinion.

I haven’t met one person who was very religious who seemed to me to be sane, or happy, or fully aware of their own behavior—it’s like they’ve been hijacked, and someone else is at the wheel. This is also why people who see through it and feel the need to give it up usually spend quite a while feeling depressed and lost—it’s because the power that’s been pulling their strings for so many years is very reluctant to let them go—and it’s going to make them pay.

I know this because this is exactly what happened to my husband and I. It’s also the very same thing that happens when people quit [among other things] voodoo cults. What ever it is that God wants, I don’t think anyone in this world really knows—it’s probably just some kind of general goodness and fairness—I highly doubt it’s anything that smacks of religion, cultic activity or ritual—because this just creates the opportunity for evil to set up shop.

I’ve said enough here—I wish I’d found out the truth about Jesus a long time ago—those of you who intuit the fictional nature of Christianity without needing to have it thoroughly proven to you that it’s completely made-up are all very perceptive—I’m impressed. Y’all take care and hang in there.

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