I grew up with very devout parents who raised me in a particularly conservative Calvinist Christian denomination, and I bought it all for years for a few reasons. For one, everyone I trusted seemed so utterly convinced by all these things I had been raised to see as fact. Also, the incredibly biased sources I was given for any questions portrayed anyone of different faiths or beliefs as deluded at best or evil at worst, which didn’t really make their positions appealing.
I prided myself on faith, because when I ran into something that didn’t make sense I’d be like “Wow, it sucks that that might make some people stumble, but I’m going to do my best to just trust God on this one.”
The first cracks started to form when I started to realize the sources I trusted might not be trustworthy. Despite all the weird religious special pleading, I’d otherwise been taught decent critical thinking, and I started to see actual rebuttals to the religious apologetics I’d been raised on, rather than the pathetic strawmen conservative Christian writers had constructed, it made me question the apologetics and the writers I’d thought were upfront, honest, and wise.
Still, I held onto the thread of faith. This stuff had been absolutely drilled into me, I had been raised not to let anything shake that, and I was starting to discover I really didn’t like the idea of losing my faith when that was the glue of my family and every other meaningful relationship in my life.
Any time I made friends (mostly online, some through college) who weren’t within that big Christian bubble I’d been raised in and reinforced, myself, though, it raised this weird uncomfortable thought in the back of my head: “If friends, or really anyone end up suffering for all eternity for not having this religion, how exactly am I supposed to deal with that knowledge for eternity to make heaven the bliss it’s supposed to be?” If this eternal soul of mine is perfectly able to be, like, transcendentally happy forever while knowing it’s all on the backs of billions of people suffering for eternity, that soul isn’t me anymore. In a weird way, the idea of heaven being something that would fundamentally make me something unrecognizable made the concept make a whole lot less sense… Sooo I tried not to think about it.
This went on for a few years, concerns and doubts growing quietly, and this one day, someone was trying to talk to me about ghosts. He asked if I believed in ghosts in the first place and I said “No.” and he was downright surprised because, you know, all these people say they’ve seen ghosts! He says he’s seen ghosts! And, yeah, I don’t find that compelling.
I went home and thought about that, then thought about the purported evidence for ghosts, then thought about the defenses various religions made for their beliefs, considered why I didn’t buy them… Started to realize a parallel here- and then I buried that line of thinking. I was not okay losing my community. I was less and less certain I believed, but I still wanted to play the part so it would keep my faith going.
COVID happened, as did the BLM protests of 2020, and it suddenly became extremely clear that my community kind of fucking sucked. That popped the lid on my thoughts and I started to look in earnest at what I believed, and why other people with the same general beliefs could think that treating people as other people was optional.
Ultimately, I ended up in an epistemological situation. A number of the “facts” of the Bible were patently untrue, with the same sorts of errors I’d seen as gotchas against other religions. The arguments I’d seen for belief were much more obviously poorly formulated when I compared them to near-identical arguments for other religions. I realized my epistemology had a big fucking problem with it, and that problem was the belief in faith as indicative of truth. Oh, hey, look at that, people can and have believed every possible position on faith. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?
So I let it go. I let the faith go. I let the bad argumentation go. I let myself let go of the morally absurd positions I’d been boxed into by a bunch of ancient writings. I by and large lost that community, but I had started reaching out to make friends outside of it for a bit now. I had something, and that made it easier.
My family is still in my life, though thankfully several hundred miles away. They still are pretty unhappy about the whole situation, even more upset than they are about me being trans, which I finally realized I was able to admit to myself after letting go of the religious dogma.
Anyway, it took me a long time to get here, and I can’t help but be upset that 26 years of my life were colored by a view of the world that I find morally unconscionable now, but at least I got to ramble about it on lemmy to almost the character limit.
For what it’s worth, ferrets are domesticated (from the European polecat) and generally speaking just die if they end up in the wild.