Not everyone is so lucky as to be given religious trauma by two different branches of the same base religion. Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity to be specific. The churches were nondenominational, but clearly they were Evangelical at their core. One even turned into a mega church where they guilt tripped and scared people into tithing more and more and more. So that's what I'll categorize the experience as. For extra clarity: I was always an atheist, and I was a very anxious child.
I was baptized as a baby and participated in the first communion, but I did not go through Confirmation (pointless). From a young age you're already fed rules to follow to avoid eternal damnation. Disobey your parents? Hell. Have a fight with your sibling? Hell. Anything human, anything that a normal kid would do was cause for damnation. Sin was lurking around every corner. Hell was guaranteed to bad little kids who didn't go to confession. Maybe this is where the anxiety really started. The constant threat of my soul being dragged into a fucked up hellscape for eternal torture was constant. I 'sinned' regardless, but I would be lying if it didn't instill a sense of dread in me at the time.
It was around elementary age when the shift to nondenominational churches happened. My mom was running from Catholicism, but ended up running towards an even worse extreme. Soon it wasn't just sinning to worry about, the devil was everywhere. She began being extra paranoid about our salvation and even burned some books thinking they would open our hearts to Satan. I was forced to sit through incredibly distressing plays put on at churches, the purpose of them solely to instill the fear of Hell in the audience. The distressing performances were more upsetting than some made up Hell. It was tonal whiplash to be told God was compassionate and loving, only to see shit like that. It wasn't just the content of the sermons are media, either. The way people in those churches treated me and others was awful. Adults will look at an atheist teen with so much contempt and then dare to pray over you to find Jesus. I'll talk about my experiences from going to a Christian summer camp and a Christian teen weekend retreat later. This is already getting pretty long.
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wowee some deep thinker dork wrote that first post (me). that's not how I want to talk about any of this, anyway. when you're a casual person it's impossible to keep up the facade. so I'm not going to.
I am at the crossroads of atheism, paganism, and satanism. Grabbing each road with my hands and weaving them together to make something new, something hard to explain. Secular, yet spiritual. There's no word for it now and I don't care if there ever is one. Humans are complex and so is the unknown.
Existentialism brings me the peace others seek in religion. My purpose is to exist. I do not seek comfort, nor meaning. I only weave and walk these roads experience and curiosity. There is beauty in chaos. Canaillerie (nischief). The universe reminds me of the fae. Skepticism and secularism for balance, the foundation on which my beliefs have always been built. Science to understand the world and spiritualism to understand who we are. It's beautiful isn't it?
