#a little biblical and egyptian too but nothing came to mind right away

[smokeybrand]

Exodus

Listening to church people talk about why so many people are leaving the church is kind of amazing. I can only speak from my experience as to why i bailed, but I've spoken to other people who decided to walk away and there's no one answer. Losing one's faith is as personal as finding it but there is a common thruway among all of our journeys away from Christ; The answers weren't there. No one just wakes up and decides "F*ck Jesus from now on." Like with anything you devote yourself to, there is a period of extreme crisis when face with it's end. If you leave a job after twenty years, there's apprehension of what comes next. Now, imagine what that's like for someone who is questioning a core piece of themselves which they use a defining aspect. People interchange who they are with their faith all the time. It's as automatic as breathing in a lot of cases. But then, all of a sudden, you are aware of your breath and you have no idea if you're doing it right or if you're doing it at all. That's what it's like to have a spiritual crisis. You don't want to question these things that literally give you life but you can't stop once you start. You search for reasons to maintain, to stay. You want, so desperately, for that one thing to flip the switch again but it never comes. This period of searching can last years. For me, it was watching my grandma pass. That took around a year. By the time she breathed her last, i was out. A cat i went to school with started questioning his own faith around the same time i did, probably about eleven or twelve years old, but it took him a decade to actually feel comfortable enough to walk away, all the while doing what i did when i was a teenager; searching for answers that made sense, that made faith, worth.

No one just bails on their faith without a strong period of study, introspection, or inward journey. It's never taken lightly but, once you start down that road, you rarely deviate from the path. Once the scales fall from your eyes, you can't put them back. It's been about twenty-five years since i stopped believing and never once have i wanted to come back to the church or regretted my decision to walk away. In that time, I've learned so much more about my former faith, the context of it's construction, it's historical merit, and the way it's weaponized by bad actors as a means of domination or control. The more i learned, the more problematic faith became. The better i understand the motivations behind the Word, the less i could hear it. The thing that really solidified my defection came in a philosophy book I read my sophomore year of high school. It wasn't something difficult to understand or an unknowable theory. When i was fifteen, i came across the Epicurus God Paradox. You can google that to find out the exact wording but reading those eight simple lines, really put into perspective what i had felt for about three years up to that point. I went from questioning myself, to questioning the religion, itself. I didn't get any answers. The questions weren't hard and the answers given made more sense than anything I read in the Bible, but no one else who championed the Good Book, had a satisfactory rebuttal. No one could give me the answers i needed to sate my curiosity which led me to believe there are no answers to be had. There is no endgame, there is no wisdom to be had, there is nothing but the promise. It's a carrot on the end of a stick. We were being lead around in circles by men two thousand years in the grave.

That didn't make any sense to me so i began to dig deeper. If the faith, itself couldn't answer my query, then maybe the historical evidence they tout as proof, would hold at least some answers. Once again, all I got was ore questions. studied the genesis of Jewish faith, i looked into how the creation myths tied to other, non-Christian, religions. I learned about the apocryphal texts like The Book of Judas, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Book of Enoch, and The Book of Thomas. The Dead Sea scrolls are apocryphal texts, too, so why are those accepted and these others denied? Who chose to canonize these books and why? That led me to the Council of Nicaea which immediately, in my mind, invalidated every interpretation of the Word from that moment on. The Council convened in 325 AD, two hundred and ninety-two years after Christ died. Everything in that bible was decided upon, by a bunch of rich, learned, white dudes, headed by Constantine I, three hundred years a after Jesus died as a tool to consolidate his power. The Bible is a propaganda tool created to pacify the ignorant masses. That really wasn't the answer I was looking for and definitely something no one taught when I was in the Church. More than any that, i saw the building blocks of the Jesus figure, going as far back as the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians. Those civilizations are thousands of years older than Jesus so how could he exists back then? If you're messiah is a facsimile, an amalgamation of other Chosen, what does that make his Word? All of these things, coincidences or not, informed my understanding that it's all just kind of made up. It's an interpretation of sh*t that came long before. It's all a game of telephone so who's to say what we're hearing at the end of that millennia upon millennia long line of whispers, is what was actually said in the first place?

How do we know the Word is actually the Word? The only answer i ever got was faith. You can't understand the word if you don't have faith. You need faith to paste over the glaring inaccuracy or logical fallacies that riddle the holy tenets. That's not enough for me, not when there is this overwhelming evidence otherwise. I can read about The Tower of Babel and cross check that information with historical fact, which repudiates the Biblical narrative. I can read the story of Noah's Flood and then point out the similarities between that and the Babylonian myth of The Great Deluge, which was written centuries before. I can even go a step further and note that, at the time time the Deluge myth was being told in Babylon, that the people who would become the Jews as we know them today, were a serf class among the Babylonians. Who's to say that Noah's Flood wasn't simply an appropriation from the higher social caste? There's even evidence that the Deluge myth was being told long before Babylon. I learned all of this after stumbling across Epicurus' paradox so long ago. How can you stay faithful to a religion that can be dismantled so simply by four questions asked by a man who lived thousands of years ago? How do you have no rebuttal for the tangible and factual evidence that can deconstruct the fulcrum of your entire belief system, and expect people to just ignore that? That's why people leave the church. The catalyst is always different but the resolution is always the same. It's not that we want to sin or that youth programs are too fun or that college leads the way to secularism, or whatever else. No, it's that faith isn't enough to cover those glaring holes in religious narrative. We are not afraid of the dark or eclipses or sacrificing maidens to sate the rage of a f*cking volcano anymore. We understand why those things are. We know that an earthquake isn’t a giant catfish throwing a tantrum or that the Oracles in Delphi weren’t having visions but were probably just really f*cking high. We got the answers we needed. Religion doesn't have tangible, rational, answers. It's all faith and belief, smoke and mirrors. It's all a big game of telephone and we all know how those games ended, right?

That said, I do find it hilarious that church folk think college is a primary issue for the exodus of faith among the youth. Like, you get to college, get around other opinions or perspectives, have a dialogue with people from completely different backgrounds or experiences, have access to a plethora of information you'd never had before and, all of a sudden, you question your faith? Really? That's the line of logic we really want to follow because it gets real problematic, bud. Kind of sounds a little bit like education is the antithesis to faith. Kind of makes it sound like you have to be ignorant and gullible to be buy into the Word. Kind of sounds like God wants to keep you barefoot and naked in the kitchen, so to speak which, interestingly enough, is kind of the the theme to Genesis? I don't know, man. It's said we got kicked out of Paradise for eating the Fruit of Knowledge, not for f*cking so... I'm not saying I believe that, I know folks who are super-religious and are incredibly intelligent, I'm saying that other church people seem to imply that with their aggressive biases toward higher education. “Keep your faith by not asking questions or learning yourself good” isn't the best pitch for people grasping at straws for a reason to continue believing. Like, it's really f*cking weird to me that Christians refer to themselves as sheep when, in any other context, that sh*t is not something in which to be proud.

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Exodus

Listening to church people talk about why so many people are leaving the church is kind of amazing. I can only speak from my experience as to why i bailed, but I've spoken to other people who decided to walk away and there's no one answer. Losing one's faith is as personal as finding it but there is a common thruway among all of our journeys away from Christ; The answers weren't there. No one just wakes up and decides "F*ck Jesus from now on." Like with anything you devote yourself to, there is a period of extreme crisis when face with it's end. If you leave a job after twenty years, there's apprehension of what comes next. Now, imagine what that's like for someone who is questioning a core piece of themselves which they use a defining aspect. People interchange who they are with their faith all the time. It's as automatic as breathing in a lot of cases. But then, all of a sudden, you are aware of your breath and you have no idea if you're doing it right or if you're doing it at all. That's what it's like to have a spiritual crisis. You don't want to question these things that literally give you life but you can't stop once you start. You search for reasons to maintain, to stay. You want, so desperately, for that one thing to flip the switch again but it never comes. This period of searching can last years. For me, it was watching my grandma pass. That took around a year. By the time she breathed her last, i was out. A cat i went to school with started questioning his own faith around the same time i did, probably about eleven or twelve years old, but it took him a decade to actually feel comfortable enough to walk away, all the while doing what i did when i was a teenager; searching for answers that made sense, that made faith, worth.

No one just bails on their faith without a strong period of study, introspection, or inward journey. It's never taken lightly but, once you start down that road, you rarely deviate from the path. Once the scales fall from your eyes, you can't put them back. It's been about twenty-five years since i stopped believing and never once have i wanted to come back to the church or regretted my decision to walk away. In that time, I've learned so much more about my former faith, the context of it's construction, it's historical merit, and the way it's weaponized by bad actors as a means of domination or control. The more i learned, the more problematic faith became. The better i understand the motivations behind the Word, the less i could hear it. The thing that really solidified my defection came in a philosophy book I read my sophomore year of high school. It wasn't something difficult to understand or an unknowable theory. When i was fifteen, i came across the Epicurus God Paradox. You can google that to find out the exact wording but reading those eight simple lines, really put into perspective what i had felt for about three years up to that point. I went from questioning myself, to questioning the religion, itself. I didn't get any answers. The questions weren't hard and the answers given made more sense than anything I read in the Bible, but no one else who championed the Good Book, had a satisfactory rebuttal. No one could give me the answers i needed to sate my curiosity which led me to believe there are no answers to be had. There is no endgame, there is no wisdom to be had, there is nothing but the promise. It's a carrot on the end of a stick. We were being lead around in circles by men two thousand years in the grave.

That didn't make any sense to me so i began to dig deeper. If the faith, itself couldn't answer my query, then maybe the historical evidence they tout as proof, would hold at least some answers. Once again, all I got was ore questions. studied the genesis of Jewish faith, i looked into how the creation myths tied to other, non-Christian, religions. I learned about the apocryphal texts like The Book of Judas, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Book of Enoch, and The Book of Thomas. The Dead Sea scrolls are apocryphal texts, too, so why are those accepted and these others denied? Who chose to canonize these books and why? That led me to the Council of Nicaea which immediately, in my mind, invalidated every interpretation of the Word from that moment on. The Council convened in 325 AD, two hundred and ninety-two years after Christ died. Everything in that bible was decided upon, by a bunch of rich, learned, white dudes, headed by Constantine I, three hundred years a after Jesus died as a tool to consolidate his power. The Bible is a propaganda tool created to pacify the ignorant masses. That really wasn't the answer I was looking for and definitely something no one taught when I was in the Church. More than any that, i saw the building blocks of the Jesus figure, going as far back as the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians. Those civilizations are thousands of years older than Jesus so how could he exists back then? If you're messiah is a facsimile, an amalgamation of other Chosen, what does that make his Word? All of these things, coincidences or not, informed my understanding that it's all just kind of made up. It's an interpretation of sh*t that came long before. It's all a game of telephone so who's to say what we're hearing at the end of that millennia upon millennia long line of whispers, is what was actually said in the first place?

How do we know the Word is actually the Word? The only answer i ever got was faith. You can't understand the word if you don't have faith. You need faith to paste over the glaring inaccuracy or logical fallacies that riddle the holy tenets. That's not enough for me, not when there is this overwhelming evidence otherwise. I can read about The Tower of Babel and cross check that information with historical fact, which repudiates the Biblical narrative. I can read the story of Noah's Flood and then point out the similarities between that and the Babylonian myth of The Great Deluge, which was written centuries before. I can even go a step further and note that, at the time time the Deluge myth was being told in Babylon, that the people who would become the Jews as we know them today, were a serf class among the Babylonians. Who's to say that Noah's Flood wasn't simply an appropriation from the higher social caste? There's even evidence that the Deluge myth was being told long before Babylon. I learned all of this after stumbling across Epicurus' paradox so long ago. How can you stay faithful to a religion that can be dismantled so simply by four questions asked by a man who lived thousands of years ago? How do you have no rebuttal for the tangible and factual evidence that can deconstruct the fulcrum of your entire belief system, and expect people to just ignore that? That's why people leave the church. The catalyst is always different but the resolution is always the same. It's not that we want to sin or that youth programs are too fun or that college leads the way to secularism, or whatever else. No, it's that faith isn't enough to cover those glaring holes in religious narrative. We are not afraid of the dark or eclipses or sacrificing maidens to sate the rage of a f*cking volcano anymore. We understand why those things are. We know that an earthquake isn’t a giant catfish throwing a tantrum or that the Oracles in Delphi weren’t having visions but were probably just really f*cking high. We got the answers we needed. Religion doesn't have tangible, rational, answers. It's all faith and belief, smoke and mirrors. It's all a big game of telephone and we all know how those games ended, right?

That said, I do find it hilarious that church folk think college is a primary issue for the exodus of faith among the youth. Like, you get to college, get around other opinions or perspectives, have a dialogue with people from completely different backgrounds or experiences, have access to a plethora of information you'd never had before and, all of a sudden, you question your faith? Really? That's the line of logic we really want to follow because it gets real problematic, bud. Kind of sounds a little bit like education is the antithesis to faith. Kind of makes it sound like you have to be ignorant and gullible to buy into the Word. Kind of sounds like God wants to keep you barefoot and naked in the kitchen, so to speak which, interestingly enough, is kind of the the theme to Genesis? I don't know, man. It's said we got kicked out of Paradise for eating the Fruit of Knowledge, not for f*cking so... I'm not saying I believe that, I know folks who are super-religious and are incredibly intelligent, I'm saying that other church people seem to imply that with their aggressive biases toward higher education. “Keep your faith by not asking questions or learning yourself good” isn't the best pitch for people grasping at straws for a reason to continue believing. Like, it's really f*cking weird to me that Christians refer to themselves as sheep when, in any other context, that sh*t is not something in which to be proud.