Why I Left Christianity

hey guys welcome back to another video it's clay today i thought i would touch on a subject that it's a bit nerve-racking for me to really talk about publicly and the main reason is i just know it's very controversial there's a lot of opinions especially with beliefs oftentimes people are very rigid in their beliefs they're not likely to change their minds they're not likely to accept new evidence that's sort of one of the the side effects of strong beliefs i've noticed so because of that you know i know that this could be a bit of a contentious video but at the same time if you've been following along on my videos i kind of touch on these things quite a bit it's it's like i can't really help it right and i'm sure you've heard me make comments about christianity my upbringing how i was raised and so i thought it might be a good time to kind of do a complete video to kind of talk about all these issues where did i come from how i was raised as a christian sort of how that developed and then how eventually you know it just stopped working for me and how i kind of came out of that and sort of what officially are my thoughts on the topic now sometimes i'm a little bit vague about it people in my real life i do talk about it with them i've noticed that a lot of people just really don't like to talk about this especially christians i'm not really sure why that is it's something i've always liked to talk about especially if i do have a strong belief about something it's something that i do want to discuss with people it's kind of ironic in a way that most christians i know don't really want to talk to me about it and it's something they avoid for sure i'm going to go into it here today we're going to start with a bit of a history of sort of where i came from the reason why i think this is a good idea is i've noticed that a lot of people make a lot of assumptions about me it's almost like i get this impression from people that i they're trying to convert me to christianity without realizing that i spent a lot of time in that world i was a christian and even when i say that i get this feeling like people they don't believe me it's like they they think that i wasn't really a christian so i thought it might help to clarify what i used to believe where i came from sort of the transition and then sort of what i think now about all this stuff so stick around if you'd like to hear more about that all right so maybe you've heard me talk about it before but i was raised as a christian my mom was a musician and she was a piano player singer so she was leading worship a lot and she would write music for the choirs and she directed the choir i believe at times and so this is kind of the context that i grew up in was sort of the music side so i mean from an early age i did a lot of music i started off playing piano and then i you know moved into guitar a lot and then by the time i was about 13 i i mean before that even maybe around 10 or 11 i became like obsessed with drums you know as a child i was a very scared child like i was always scared of the dark i was always getting freaked out in the middle of the night and like going into my parents room back then i don't know if anybody else can relate maybe you're a similar age i'm like late 30s now but i've checked with a few people that i know a few other friends that grew up in christian environments and they all kind of remember this there was this sort of thing going around back then um i forget what it was called but these people would come and like almost train you about the whole spiritual realm and so they were teaching people like how to cast demons out of stuff and how to walk into rooms and like you know claim the room in the name of jesus and get rid of any evil spirits that might be in there it's almost like this mentality that there's like a spirit or a demon like hiding behind every rock behind every chair like if at night if you you know if you're in tune with this stuff you can feel the presence of these different spirits and cast them out of things cast a lot of people cast a lot of animals i remember like so i kind of grew up in this context where my mom was literally casting demons out of things all the time like before we get in the car you know like she'd pray this like hedge of protection around the car or i you know i'd be going to sleep or going to bed and she'd be praying that like my angel would come and like protect me while i sleep and so i sort of grew up with this very strong mentality that there's this alternate realm there's all this stuff going on that i you know i'm trying to understand but i don't really get i know there's angels i was taught that there's literal battles going on between angels and demons all the time you know over me over my mind over my protection like there's demons that are literally trying to hurt me kill me deceive me and i've got these angels that are protecting me you know or or jesus is also protecting me and it was sort of my job to summon these people and you know invite them to help me constantly because if i didn't who knows what was going to happen right maybe one of these demons was going to get me and i like as a kid i remember i would sleep under my covers just because i was almost terrified at times to even put my head out of the covers because i was so scared of these demons i guess when i was about 13 we moved from alberta into bc in canada i went to a new school i went to a christian school and right away i was like picked up as the like drummer of the school so pretty much my entire high school i played on the worship team so every wednesday in this christian school we would have chapel and sort of like a little mini church service so i played in the the worship team like the band pretty much for my entire high school so at the same time you know i was big into like youth group in my church and i played on friday nights i played in the youth group band and then on sunday mornings we went to a pentecostal church when i was in high school on sunday morning i would play drums for the church itself it was a big church you know it could be 1500 people and so i played you know i was like a 15 year old 16 year old playing drums in this band of adults for like the whole church i think at the time i didn't really have any friends that weren't christians like i didn't really even know anybody that wasn't a christian so everybody in a position of power in my life was a christian so i i feel like i was very effectively indoctrinated with a lot of ideas i was fully immersed in that culture i read the bible i prayed constantly i was sort of taught to pray taught to constantly be praying when as i was young and so i did that and there was like this constant conversation going on inside my head so i know what that is right i get the impression from talking to a lot of people now that they think that it once you're a christian you always are you can never once you've experienced it you could never leave it i think my nature back then was i didn't really trust myself that's for sure i mean i didn't trust my intuition i remember i'd be skeptical of things but it was always very it was a silent skepticism i i rarely would voice many of my opinions in contradiction to christianity i was pretty much a model christian so backing up a little bit when i was 18 i moved off to vancouver to go to ubc so i moved to vancouver moved into this sort of christian dorm it was like a mennonite dorm so i was immediately you know still within that whole christian bubble now i was going to obviously a secular university so also i went and seeked out some churches when i got to vancouver because i wanted to play music i really was playing dramas is one of my favorite things and i ended up in one of the sort of premier music churches in vancouver the reality is church is an amazing community and i met some great people and i played some amazing music i i think it's one of the things about christianity that gets a little confused it's almost like that sense of camaraderie that that community that people get out of church people associate that with the actual religious beliefs but it's kind of a separate thing i kind of see and there's reasons to go to church even if you don't believe you know you end up with great networking opportunities but in my head i started to notice contradictions with christianity things that just didn't add up and i started to get a little uncomfortable with some of the things i was seeing in church the things that my friends and family did and said they believed things that the pastor was saying on sunday morning right like he would say a bunch of stuff you'd do a sermon and you know i'd often have questions after the sermon so as a result this was sort of a time where i started to do some of my own research on christianity and start reading certain books and really try to firm up my own belief my own faith like what do i believe you know what is true how how do i interpret this because i around this time i started to notice that of course everybody seemed to interpret the bible differently there's all these different denominations you know hundreds of them it seems like i had gone to a few different ones like pentecostal baptists alliance um a few others but there's all these little differences right like for example this pentecostal church i went to i one of my friends was the worship pastor and we would do music he was never allowed to be a full-on pastor in the church so he was the unofficial worship pastor but he was never allowed to be actually ordained or however you say it as a pentecostal pastor because he hadn't spoken tongues so you know each one of these denominations has these little intricacies so a pentecostal is you should be you should be speaking in tongues if you're not speaking in tongues then there's something wrong with you basically and you certainly can't be a pastor if you haven't spoken in tongues i remember he was talking to me about this one time and with his frustration with it because he's like well you know i would like to be an official pastor of the church the music pastor but i am not allowed because i haven't spoken in tongues and he's like well what do i do like i don't want to fake speak in tongues um like it's not happening on its own so what am i supposed to do right it's kind of this weird catch-22 that they've put this rule other churches obviously don't require you to speak in tongues to be a pastor but it was kind of around that time where i started to think about these things well who's right like there's so many different opinions and then not only that but then there's almost like different religions right so you've got christianity and then inside christianity you've got all these different types of christianity all these different beliefs different doctrines and then you know you move outside of that and then you've got you know like jehovah's witness which is kind of based on the same principles but it's clearly a different thing than normal christianity and then you've got like you know seventh-day adventists or mormons and then sort of moving from there you know you have judaism which they kind of reject the new testament but they use the same old testament as the christians and then from there you've got this sort of abrahamic god and then muslims also believe in that same god and they actually accept a part of the old testament or i'm actually not sure if it's all of the old testament but they accept the you know the core teachings of the old testament up to a certain point as truth so you've got judaism and islam using the same teachings but coming to kind of drastic different conclusions and then you've got christians coming to all these different conclusions and so i started to really become a little overwhelmed with all these different possibilities and when i would research and try to find out for myself what was true like the answers were never clear and it almost it started to sound a lot like opinion to me but one thing was clear and one thing that really started to bother me was there was an apparent contradiction between what this book said the bible what jesus taught there was a massive contradiction between that and what i saw in the world as a christian and seeing what other christians are doing how other christians are living what they are saying how they were acting there was this huge difference between what christianity was defined in culture and what the bible said christianity was and this this problem started to get bigger and bigger and i i didn't really know how to reconcile it eventually i discovered this teacher named bruxy cavey and so you can look him up if you like he's got one of the biggest churches or it might even be the biggest churches now in ontario which is in canada so he's got this huge church it's called the meeting house and the tagline of this church is a church for people who aren't into church so it's kind of catchy i started listening to his podcasts and this guy thought a lot like how i do he's more of a logical thinker he's less mystical and not just taking like thing the whimsical beliefs as true just because you know he feels like it might be true he was a very methodical person he really studied hard did a lot of research so we had these podcasts and they would come out every week but there was this huge back sort of catalog of podcasts so i started listening to those podcasts like religiously like i i had my headphones on all the time and i was just absorbing the information that he was putting out and i swear like there was years worth of podcasts there and i probably listened to all of them and many of them i listened to multiple times and it was quite mind-blowing to me at the time and i remember it was such at the time it was such a saving grace for me because i was getting confused i i didn't know what was going on anymore with the whole christian stuff and here's this guy that seemed to rephrase things kind of repackage it in a way that made much more sense to me and he focused a lot on the early teachings like what this early church looked like what did what did christianity look like for the first couple hundred years after jesus death so through like extensive research and study about this topic it became very apparent to me that the early church was very different drastically different than the church that we have today and so that was somewhat comforting to me because i looked around at all the churches all the christians all the teachings the pastor all this stuff that was being said in today like now and a lot of it seemed like complete nonsense to me there's contradictions there's hypocrisy there's extreme judgment christians living essentially like atheists and calling themselves christians like it just made no sense to me and it really bothered me so when i discovered that there was this difference with the early church that really settled me because it allowed me to go okay well all of this is nonsense that's why this is nonsense because it is nonsense but there is still something here and if i look hard enough i can hopefully find it so that's why i really dove into the concept of this early church and like what does the bible actually say what does jesus actually say right if i actually turn off everything that church is telling me that jesus said and then i actually look for myself what did he actually say what can i learn about this thing called christianity that may or may not be different from this thing that used to be called christianity so it seemed to me like jesus central teaching revolved around kind of peace and love so not only love your neighbor as yourself but also like take that further even to love your enemy as yourself which was interesting to me because as i looked around like i didn't really see any of the christians i knew even loving their neighbor as themselves like if you actually think about the implications of what that means what does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself i i'll come back to that because that is such a conundrum in my head i could never quite resolve what did that mean but not only that but love your enemy as yourself people join wars and kill their enemies in the name of their country well how do you do that as a christian how do you kill your enemy while also loving your enemy as yourself like these kind of things really started to add up and when i saw in the early church that they had answers for these this was very comforting so for example the early christians wouldn't go to war they wouldn't join the military they wouldn't even be in the police or you know authority figures like that in fact they wouldn't even put themselves into positions of power at all so you know government was completely out and from my research i discovered that if a like say a government official became a christian the leaders of the church would write to that person and ask them to resign because you just it was just understood that you couldn't be a christian and in the government so i realized if you're a christian and you're watching this this is immediately going to grind with you because people in today's age are so used to the idea that we want christians in power we we want to like vote the bible we want to create laws that reinforce christianity but that's actually not how the early church operated they wanted nothing to do with it because they realized let's say you're the president of the united states and you're a christian you can't put your heavenly kingdom above the country because if you do that the country will fall somebody will invade you and take it over so you need to put the country first as the leader of the country but then you're not putting you know the kingdom of christ first so there was this idea that countries and christianity were contradictory ideas and when i first heard this it was it was such a relief because to me it just didn't make sense how so many people they call themselves christians and then they go fight on behalf of that country and actually kill other christians so you could have two christians from two countries their countries have decided that they are at war but here's these two christians that are supposed to be part of a community that supersedes countries and yet they're killing each other so the early church had a clear answer to that there was a complete separation between church and state and they wanted nothing to do with the state so another big difference was they met in houses they had sort of small intimate groups churches and you know depending on where these people lived could have been you know a lot of these things were in secret because you know for a while you know the romans were killing christians uh christians were fairly persecuted so a lot of times it was quite secret when they met but even still there was no like mega churches with these massive worship bands and worship essentially concerts right it seems like when i look at churches today what is the point like what is the main focus the main focus seems to be the music the concert the worship right the main focus could also be community like a secondary focus like actually learning things and knowledge and being inquisitive and study seems like a secondary goal when i look at most churches these days so the early christians they called themselves sort of followers of the way so i think that was one of the first things that they called themselves followers of the way and i mean it's hard to know these things for sure but from what i can tell from what i've read is that the term christian which kind of meant little christ it was almost a term that was given to them by everybody else and the reason why is because here's a group of people that were living like christ living like jesus and so they were called like many christs people could see it in them that these people were like jesus and being a follower of jesus was sort of the central point of being a christian back then and so from what i understand it wasn't even a term that christians liked to call themselves because it almost sounded like bragging or it sounded like egotistical to be like i'm a little christ like i'm a i'm i'm basically doing what jesus did so you've got these people that are calling themselves followers basically followers of jesus is how they saw it and so here's an interesting point about this word following and this is something that really stuck with me and i couldn't quite equate with today's christians so let's say christianity means follower of christ when i asked myself what does it mean to follow somebody what does it mean to follow jesus i mean the simplest answer is that you do what he does so here's jesus what let's just figure out what he did and then we'll do that and we're following him and so this issue really bothered me because when i went to church all my christian friends the people that i knew that were christians didn't really seem to be doing what jesus did they seem to be doing something else they kind of had this idea of what they should be doing but to me it didn't seem like following here's a guy who basically was homeless traveled around and spoke to people loved people hung out with kind of the scum of society a lot of times he hung out with like the tax collectors and like the the prostitutes and he didn't care what anybody thought about him that's really clear he didn't seem to care about authority or pleasing the authorities of the day like the pharisees and the religious leaders of that time the religious leaders of that time in fact really didn't like him they thought you know which makes sense because in the end they actually killed him but the point is is that jesus was a very counter-cultural figure that centered around loving people helping people comforting the lost comforting the vulnerable and when i would look at church in today today's age i don't really see people doing that very much in fact what i do see is i see people people putting on concerts and when i would ask look why is this the point of church why is singing these songs the point of church there was never really a clear answer it bothered me so this this went on for a number of years i was trying to reconcile this problem the difference between a follower of christ and what i was seeing until one day it kind of clicked and i realized that christianity had been redefined so in the old days it was a follower of christ the early church today at least from my opinion i haven't heard this from anywhere else this was sort of my own epiphany that i had that a christian has been redefined from follower of christ to worshiper of christ and this is a really convenient thing because if you're a worshiper you can go to church on sunday you can do your worship you can go home and you can live like an atheist the rest of the week you don't have to do any following you have to do what jesus did you don't to follow his teachings i mean sure is it nice that you do that and are you encouraged to do that yes but you don't have to to satisfy the definition of a christian so once i kind of realized that that christianity had been kind of redefined into this christ worshipper and there was really no growth required really all you had to do was believe this little nugget of information what the jesus came to die for your sins as long as you believed that and then did your worship you went there on sunday morning you know you scrunched your eyes up you like summon this like guilt you summon this worthlessness you kind of put it on yourself for a minute and then you you kind of like project it up to god and you say please you know forgive me of this sin and forgive me of my filth i'm such a lousy person um i just really started to notice this pattern especially through the leaders of the churches there was this summoning of shame guilt and worthlessness constantly and yet when i read in the bible it didn't really seem like that was the point to constantly revisit this thing every week where you summon the worthlessness all over again you ask for forgiveness you you know admit how broken you are and when i fully realized this i remember one day i was sitting in church and here comes the soft music at the end the pastor he starts scrunching up his eyes and praying and summoning that worthlessness all over again and i just sat there with my eyes open and i looked around and i saw all these people sitting in these pews or chairs doing absolutely nothing useful all summoning their worthlessness all at once there's a thousand people in this church and i started to think what would happen if instead of sitting here scrunching up her eyes you know asking for forgiveness again we all went out and did something useful for a change rather than sit here and like indulge this pastor who has a four-year degree he doesn't know the answers he doesn't know any i have a four-year degree it doesn't make me an expert what if we all went and did something useful and i literally felt like standing up and designed everybody in that church people stop it like stop doing this every single week if you truly believe that you are forgiven then trust that you are forgiven and now go and do some following for a change find somebody to help let's go do a community project let's go clean something up let's there's homeless people all over the place why don't we do something for them you know these homeless people they're not they're they're they're bankrupt in relationships people treat them so poorly why don't we just go sit and talk with a homeless person today there's a thousand of us you know imagine there's a like if we all did an hour that's a thousand hours of work and i never i never went back after that point in fact my wife she would take my daughter to sunday school i wouldn't i remember i tried to go back one more time and i'm sitting there and i'm listening to the pastor and it just didn't make sense what he was saying i from all my research it wasn't christianity it was something else he's talking about something else i just couldn't go in the church anymore so all this being said i still at my core believe that christianity was salvageable i just thought that what the church had become was sort of like this monster it was like this frankenstein that had grown out of what christianity used to be and it's interesting if you actually look at history all those things i was talking about with regards to you couldn't be in the military you can be in like the police you couldn't be you know even in the government all that lasted until constantine so he was an emperor of rome and he converted to christianity so he was the first emperor and this fundamental shift happened in christianity with constantine because obviously he's the emperor of rome he's not going to resign and become a regular guy just so he can become a christian and it was at that point that christianity was kind of rewritten and that's sort of when that holy roman empire kind of came out of that this idea that you could be of jesus but still like slay your enemy you could take over countries all in the name of jesus and this you know went on for uh i don't know a thousand fifteen hundred years right until you get to like the holy wars and you've got literally you've got christians taking over other countries killing muslims in the name of god even though clearly the teachings of jesus are all about peace there is really no way you can make a case i mean i guess there is something called just war theory there's people that debate is just war theory valid and i really dove into that and at first i was like well maybe you can make a case but you know over time it just became less and less credible to me that that you could even make a case that you could justify war in the name of jesus you mean if you look back in the middle ages you had christians torturing people into converting so it's like well you're not a christian i don't want to kill you because then you're going to hell i'm going to convert you first then i'm going to kill you and now i'm sending you to heaven they literally did that you know all that stuff with burning people at the stake and you know killing witches and it was our christianity today comes out of that and i think a lot of people don't want to admit that like the protestant reformation if you actually look at sort of the key figures in that um you know you had the anabaptists and the anabaptists were some of the first ones that decided that you shouldn't be baptized as a child you should baptize yourself you get baptized when you're older when you can make the decision and like the violence that came out of just such a simple thing the protestants were killing the anabaptists the catholics were killing the anabaptists in fact they would kill them with something they would call the third baptism you know because the people were baptized when they were infants and then the anabaptists were baptizing themselves again and so they would kill the anabaptists with the third baptism with just basically drowning them in rivers so here you've got christians killing other christians in the name of jesus and it's essentially you know like you know john calvin and calvinism and how that came about you actually look at what that guy stood for and the atrocities that he committed and then you look at all these denominations today that are calvinists that came out of of that guy when i actually looked at the history of it it just became almost well it was embarrassing but it became disgusting to me i just i couldn't believe that anybody would be okay following the theology of these things and these people that came out of all that bloodshed murder a complete i mean if anything it was the opposite of christianity here you have a person that was all about peace love enemy love and then it came full circle to this point where it was like kill anything it doesn't agree with you and so i started to really identify with those anabaptists so the anabaptists eventually became you know the mennonites the amish all these people and it seemed to me that they were the ones who maybe had a a little bit right anyway so i basically couldn't go to regular church anymore uh like every time i went i just felt like staying up and arguing with the pastor about what they were saying i would email them questions afterwards and challenge them about you know their theology and where did that come from like what how did you come up with that statement i don't really think that's true and i would never get clear answers i found that most pastors would use kind of word salad to kind of talk around issues they would never answer my questions directly if you don't know what word salad is it's basically like politicians do it a lot as well they get these questions and a lot of words come out of their mouth and they kind of talk around the issue but they they never really get to the core of the issue and at the end you know if someone's talked for five or ten minutes and you're like oh okay and then you move on it's kind of a it's almost a manipulation technique in my opinion to not answer a question word salad so i mean this is rampant throughout christianity not answering questions and it's almost like if you're the type of person that has questions you're almost looked down upon and if you don't accept these words solid fake answers you know you're almost seen as a doubter or or whatever anyway after i came to the conclusion that a christian instead of just being a worshiper that worships and then lives like an atheist all week really there should be something more than that i ended up in metro so metro is this very counter-cultural kind of church in my city it's called metro community the church is basically half full of people that are experiencing homelessness or various states of like extreme poverty a lot of street people went there they would have food so people could come in like in the winter they could come warm up and eat food and listen it was a very liberal place but it centered around helping people and at the time this is something i could grab onto i could be like okay all these other children like what are these other churches even doing they're just doing concerts all day making people feel good they're not helping anybody like i did some work video work for one of these big churches one time and uh i found out that they had a million dollar a year media budget a million dollars a year was being spent on producing these concerts you know these big productions various media orientated things and i remember thinking like what if they took that million dollars and started a shelter for like women who were abused or all these people in the street that are addicted to drugs like there's there's people that need real help here and i remember i was i became almost disgusted by this traditional model of church i i didn't know what what to do about it so that's where i ended up at metro and the interesting thing about metro is it seems to be there's a lot of these types of people people that just can't fit into regular church anymore but are still christians they still call themselves christians but they don't really in a lot of ways it's almost like a bunch of like tired christians that's almost how i would describe what metro is but here's metro doing real things so i got pretty involved with metro i was helping out with like media stuff and doing video and just talking with people and trying to befriend some of these people and in a lot of ways i got extremely educated along the way of really about homelessness and about these people in the street and the ignorance that's that revolves around all those issues how even christians just have such judgmental incorrect opinions and attitudes towards these people in the street but what the real problems were so you know for a time i was able to kind of find a place there so at metro i quickly became friends with a lot of the leaders and like the board members and i remember i ended up in this bible study so and i i remember i started asking some really hard questions there was other things i was researching at the time like the concept of hell a lot of these things came from this early church i learned that for example back in the early church there was actually three theories about what hell was nowadays christians have adopted one of those theories and when i actually traced it back it was actually augustine who popularized the eternal torment theory which means like the classic definition of what everybody thinks hell is that you go to this place and you burn forever but i started to realize there's actually two other theories one of them being that you just cease to exist there is no physical place called hell another one was sort of like a temporary hell where you could go there and sort of work your way out and eventually get to heaven so you know i was learning about all these things and look that up on youtube if you're a christian look up there's this really good lecture maybe i'll try to find it and put in the comments hopefully i can find it if i can i'll put it in there but it's this christian theologian as he analyzes this guy has spent his whole field of study analyzing what does the bible even say about hell and it seems to me from all my research that the most likely version of what the bible says hell is is not eternal torment and so i'm in this bible study and i'm constantly bringing up these kinds of issues and i remember people i remember one time i brought up this hell thing and i was talking about that maybe we all have it wrong maybe it's not that maybe it's it's this other theory which you know isn't as popular anymore and now it's almost become heresy to mention it and i remember somebody asked me she's like she stopped me and she's like but but why does any of this matter why don't we just come back to the core of christianity you know and just believe and trust and i sort of paused for a moment as i realized really this is what i come up against constantly whenever i raise real questions real problems it's always shut down don't think about that that doesn't matter come back to this like warm fuzzy feeling where we all just agree and believe and trust in jesus and and start that whole worship process again just close your eyes and start the worship you're you know and i looked at her and i said this is everything to me because if this eternal torment doesn't exist if this is a lie then how many people are christians just so they don't go to hell i i started to question whether it was even possible to make an informed decision about whether something was true or not when the repercussion is burning for eternity in hell just think about that for a moment you've got this short time on earth and if you screw it up you end up eternity in heaven or eternity burning in hell the risk is so high that you will get people like me my whole life i was taught that there was this illiteral hell where you would burn forever if you screwed this up if you didn't get it right the stress and the anxiety inside of me my whole life because of that what if i'm not doing it right what if you know what if i'm not believing this thing or i'm the right thing or am i going to end up in hell right and i just i basically gave them all a lecture at that point about this topic anyway every single time we met it kind of turned into this and i was sort of like the black sheep of this bible study as i raised all these questions all these problems and i was like in full-on research mode it was my main interest at the time was researching all this stuff and so eventually i i realized this thing it's that the bible is ambiguous and a skilled teacher can make the bible say anything they want you can justify just about anything as long as you can do enough like word gymnastics and mental backflips to sort of turn this thing that could be taken literally like slavery i mean the bible openly condones slavery it's not an accident that you know in the united states slavery was a real thing and a real problem and it was all there was a lot of christians who owned slaves it's not an accident the bible you can easily justify slavery with the bible and i started to realize that really anybody could say anything they wanted by using the bible you've got these three theory of theories of hell you've i mean pick any topic right you want to go to war you don't want to go to war i mean you can cherry pick verses you can take things that are meant to be literal and make them metaphorical you can take things that are meant to be metaphorical and completely distort them into these new crazy theories i find it very confusing when the bible will say something quite plainly and then christians will be like oh no no that's not what it means it actually means this and then they take it as this metaphor and i started to question them like well if you can just take anything at any time in the bible and make it a metaphor for some other thing i mean how do you really and then but at the same time taking other things as literal so the convenient things can be literal but the inconvenient things like slavery can be taken you know in this metaphor it it started to seem like a giant game so along this time i listened to a thing from bruxy about the inerrancy of the bible and until this point i had always assumed what i'd been taught i was taught that the bible was inerrant that means there's no mistakes no contradictions it's perfect it's the perfect word of god every word is god breathed and inspired it although it was written down by men it is god's word and that's why it's called the word of god so i was just taught that it was inerrant but one thing i started to realize with this whole literal versus metaphorical thing as i saw people do all these mental backflips to create meaning out of things that seem to be clear and they're trying to create another meaning out of it i started to realize that how can you really believe anything in the bible is true i think the inerrancy argument is fundamental to accepting that anything you read in the bible is true because let's say for example that you believe the bible had errors how could you really guarantee that anything that you've read so let's say you read one little chapter or one verse and then you use that to apply to your life how do you know that that also isn't an error so as soon as you admit that there might be errors it it really does it's a rabbit hole to admitting there might be lots of errors it might the whole thing might be unreliable so it seems to me and this is something that i've always been a little confused about how people can admit there's errors in the bible yet still treat it as truth so i think that's why for me you have to look at the bible as an errand if you're taking literal truths out of it it has to be inerrant and if you start to realize that it's not inerrant or there are contradictions or are errors then to me that's not something that you can just accept lightly to me there's massive implications from that to the point where maybe you can't trust this book at all so i realized this one day and so i started to look to see if there were errors were there contradictions and much to my surprise when i started researching this you can actually look for yourself there's all these people that are claiming all these contradictions and errors in the bible and one by one if you research each of these contradictions you'll get people's pointing out the error of the contradiction but then you'll get people explaining the contradictions away but again it sort of seemed in some of these issues for me it seemed like those mental backflips again like for example i'll give a really simple example there's complex examples in the bible there's all kinds of contradictions that you can look up or potential errors but here's a really simple one it almost seems you know inconsequential it's so simple in the gospel of mark jesus was crucified on the third hour so that's mark 15 25 so that's basically just saying what time of day jesus was crucified in the third hour so in the gospel of john which is a different book it says that pilate sentenced jesus to death on about the sixth hour and that's john 19 14. there's also another contradiction in there about the day that jesus was crucified one says you know it was before passover one says it was after passover but i'm going to focus on this time thing for a minute so this might seem really insignificant to a lot of people it's like oh big deal who cares what time of day jesus was was crucified i would also agree it doesn't really matter for the general story however it raises this one point is there is a contradiction here one says that he was crucified on the third hour the second one says he wasn't even sentenced until the sixth hour and then he was crucified you know sometime after so what you have here is two books of the bible they're saying different things and so it's a tiny little contradiction that might not matter however this is my question when i read little things like this so although if you actually look this up on the internet you will find explanations about why people say this they're like well back in the day time wasn't as strict as it is now you know um you know they basically did this sort of like you know quarters of the day like a morning mid morning afternoon mid-afternoon evening kind of thing and so really this is just kind of a very abstract concept time and i go okay well that makes sense if a man wrote it but if you are a god writing a book that's meant to be read 2 000 years later i mean you're gonna know that time becomes an important thing so why would you as a god that is writing a book that is inerrant why would you put something that was a plain inconsistency why would you get those two times wrong one of them is right one of them is wrong they can't both be right unless you sort of accept this well it doesn't really matter it's it's just sort of inconsequential people didn't take time seriously back then see for me i started to think you know that's a contradiction and if there was a god let's say this is a god inspired book at the very least he could get details like that correct at the very least he would know that this book's going to be around for at least a couple thousand years who knows how long will humanity survive it could be around in another thousand years from now if it was inerrant why wouldn't those two things be the same and so there's lots of other examples little things like this there's this one example actually it's up top of my head so i don't know the reference but paul starts off the first verse of a chapter saying you know one thing and then he goes oh actually yeah and then he says something else and and i've heard the reason why he did that he actually contradicts himself in a previous verse he says something and then he corrects himself which is normal speech right and the you know the reason that i've heard for this is that you know back then you had like a scribe who's writing down what you say so you're basically dictating so here's this this guy writing down everything that he says as he dictates it you know rather than go back and start this whole page over again it's just easier to continue and correct himself but really that is another contradiction in the first verse it says one thing in like a later verse it says the opposite if this truly was god inspired if this was the perfect word of god why would these things exist i started to ask these kinds of questions and at first the question was extremely hard to ask because i had been conditioned that god was listening to my thoughts he was there he was always always there inside of me and i somebody i could talk to any time so i sort of grew up praying constantly and i would pray for things throughout the day right and so it's almost a scary thing to start questioning your beliefs because you know well this this god is listening to you as you even question whether he exists it might hurt his feelings maybe he's gonna you know basically accuse you of blasphemy and there's all these things maybe blasphemies the unforgivable sin and it's like there's lots of reason not to question your beliefs but around this time i i really tried to give myself permission to do it i i started to play devil's advocate with myself what if this isn't inherent so eventually i kind of came to the conclusion that i don't think it is inerrant and i think that that has implications i think that that implies that maybe it wasn't god inspired maybe it was written down by men an account of what jesus said and so around this time how did i how did i deal with this issue i redefined the bible not to be the thing itself that you it's almost like i've noticed that some people almost treat the bible as the religion it's almost like they worship the bible itself here is the word of god they elevate this word of god and they worship it instead of god there's a word that's actually for that's called a biblion and it's sort of a tongue-in-cheek word nobody admits to being a biblion but the general idea is that you worship the bible instead of the god behind the bible so i started to realize that maybe this bible did have errors in it maybe i couldn't trust the intricate details but what i can trust is the general message so here's this guy jesus almost look at the bible like a window that you look through to find the person of jesus behind you're looking through this window don't treat the window as the god but there is a god behind it so this is how i reconciled this at first and i started to look at the overall teachings of jesus rather than like the very specific little verses like you know people will pull these verses out and and make you know these grand claims so this actually this state i went through this state for a number of years i kind of was in this state of this like i was this odd christian and i think i see it a lot right there's a lot of people that are that say oh i'm not one of those normal christians i i'm still i still believe in jesus and it's almost like they're embarrassed to be associated with christianity that's exactly where i was for a number of years it's people would ask me if i was a christian and i'd be like well i'm definitely not one of those christians if that's your definition but i still do have these beliefs and then i would say what they are i get a lot of people messaging me now trying to convert me back to christianity using that kind of an argument the reality is though is that i was in that place for years so i'm very familiar with what that is and what it feels like i'm very familiar with the fact that christianity today it seems more like a monster than an actual reflection of what jesus taught however as my research deepened i started to research the validity of the bible itself because here's the thing right a lot of christians say all kinds of things but a lot of it comes from the bible and then even the the proof of why the bible is real it's almost like they use the bible as a source of evidence for the bible itself and it becomes this kind of cyclical reasoning which is obviously not a valid argument it's like a logical fallacy you can't use a thing as the evidence for itself so really i started to realize that the only way i could believe in this book was to first prove the validity of the book so i started to look at how did this book get created and to be honest i was slightly disappointed in kind of what i found so for example the earliest gospel of jesus was written at least 50 years after jesus death the others were written you know past that and i was you know it's funny i never really thought about this as a christian like i assumed that you know the disciples who were with jesus wrote down his teachings after his death but that's actually not true you know the gospel of matthew mark luke john they weren't even written by the disciples the matthew wasn't actually written by matthew because you know earliest could have been 50 years let's say and so you know i don't know about you but to me this created a massive problem how can you accurately write down somebody's words like 50 years to a hundred years by the time the other ones are written after a person says them and so i heard this analogy not too long ago and it was like can you imagine if you know take a president jfk his like commencement speech that he gives it would be like me right now trying to write down his words word for word however i have no recordings i have no written records of what he said all i really have is hearsay and i might be able to find somebody who was there but that person would be extremely old probably not at this point i would probably have to know somebody who knew somebody that was there and so you would also have this sort of oral culture that had developed around the teachings and so you know who knows you've had like let's say 50 years of people kind of repeating what jesus said i mean if you ever played that game telephone as a kid where you go around the circle you realize that things get convoluted as people pass them along and you know i've heard arguments just in case somebody throws this at me that back then they were in oral culture they were much more careful with it but then you know i've also read things that are basically the actual words the the the intricacies of the syntax weren't as important back then and the general ideas and the stories and that's what was important so like that's why maybe jesus spoke in parables so much is because parables were something that could be remembered right so anyway i kind of realized through that study that there is no evidence that the bible is accurate and reliable there's no evidence that says that what is written down in there is is actually what jesus taught i mean sure i think it's probably safe to assume you'll get some kind of semblance of it but to the level of detail that most christians think where it's this word for word account i just can't find any evidence for that the only way that you could believe that would be if you believe that it was god breathed but then i have a problem with that because if it was god breathed why wouldn't it be more cohesive why wouldn't it be more coherent why are there contradictions why is everything so vague and this kind of comes down to a fundamental question i have um and it's more of a logic question let's say there was a god and he created this universe with the intensity of this universe and the logical systems that run the universe like math chemistry physics biology there's these clear logical rules biology and how these things work and cells and you know the cell it's this tiny little building block and they all work together with all the other cells to create these complex organisms but then you actually look inside of a cell and the complexity that is inside that cell it is very ordered and very logical and so this was one of my main questions why would a god that appears to be so logical so smart smart enough to create all this why does he resort to this book that is just this jumble of things written over centuries it's not it wasn't a cohesive book it appears to be written by men with errors there's no evidence that it actually is accurate there's no evidence that what it says is true i mean there are so many books out there i mean all religions have religious texts so this is another thing it comes down to well the quran is a religious text i mean there's there's hindu text buddhist texts every religion has text and they all believe them as true but then when i actually look well why should i believe that this particular one is the true one unfortunately i just couldn't find a valid reason i couldn't find a reason why this was true and the problem is if you can't find a reason why the bible's true then everything else is almost inconsequential you can't believe what it says in here if you have no reason to believe that the words themselves are the the word of god and so i went through this really awkward time where i gave myself permission to question a lot of these things and i started questioning almost everybody i knew that was a question christian to kind of answer some core questions and i was kind of like sorely disappointed it seemed like nobody that i knew that was a christian had real reasons why they believed it and so i actually ended up writing bruxy a letter so here's a guy that's like pretty famous he's he goes around and speaks all over the world he's got like a church with 4 000 people and i wrote him a letter asking him some of my core questions and he wrote me back and although he had the most cohesive response of anybody it still it wasn't satisfying to me i i don't know how i i just i don't want to pretend i guess i don't want to pretend that something is valid when it's not that something makes sense when it doesn't so i started to ask people this question if i woke up one day and i had lost my memory say i'd had amnesia i couldn't remember anything including what i believed what you know so i have all these christian friends but i don't even remember why i was a christian i don't remember why this is true why did i believe this what would you tell me why why what reasons would you have to convince me that christianity was the real one and all the other choices like let's say you want to be a muslim or a buddhist or hindu or hare krishna or judaism or you know mormon or jehovah's witness or what do you have to say about your choice of faith why should i pick that one over the other ones and i think it's an interesting question because it forces people not to prove the existence of god but to prove the exact flavor of god i think that trying to prove the existence of god at all is well it's it's not really possible i mean i've i've spent 10 years digging through all the reasons about trying to prove god and all of them in my opinion there's no valid evidence there's no real proof to even prove that there is a god but let's just say for a moment there was and now there we know there's a god at that point how do you choose which flavor of god i mean there's hundreds there could be thousands of different versions and i find it a little too convenient that most people happen to believe the version that they were brought up with so most christians are christians because they were brought up as christians most muslims are muslims because they were brought up as muslims most you know people live in india and they were brought up in hinduism they're just not christians by accident it would be very difficult for them to become a christian because first of all there's nobody indoctrinating with the ideas so i ca this is the question i asked another version of the question that i asked was if i was an alien that just showed up on earth today and i was trying to decide which religion was true what would you say to convince me of your religion so i started asking this question to almost everybody i know and if if any of my friends are watching this you'll probably know and and you know this this question got heated at times and people get frustrated because they'll say stuff and i'll be like okay well that's not a valid reason because of x y and z like do you have an actual reason and i noticed this trend as i went through this thought experiment i didn't find a single person that had a real reason not even one person every single person the reason that they used was experience it was i knew somebody one time and he had a tumor and we prayed and it went away or you know i prayed for this and i got it therefore god and i'm not trying to discount experience but people use can use experience to justify just about anything i mean one thing i really started to notice was like for example i was following a hardcore catholic on twitter and she was bipolar i really was she was an interesting person to follow but like for example one night she's like i had this experience at night and mother mary came and i just felt the presence of mother mary and blah blah this whole thing happened and then that strengthened her faith but you know a christian instead of calling it mother mary would call it the holy spirit the holy spirit came to me and i had this experience whereas you know a muslim would call it something else you know allah i don't know a lot about that religion but let's say allah came to me and you know told me this this and this i started to notice that a lot of people were having these experiences and then they were assigning a name to it for really with no reason and i just started to see patterns another pattern that i noticed was an actual logical fallacy which is they would say things like well how else do you explain that like i know one person they had this experience in the shower this complete emotional breakdown experience and he thought it was god coming to finally wake him up and of course he then took that as jesus and christianity and this is the version of god that came to me and whatever and after he told me that you know i sort of said a few things and he said well how else do you explain it and this is the thing that is the reason that is used a lot here's this thing that happened and i'm just gonna assign a reason to that or assign a meaning because how else can you explain it and this is the reason why that actually is a logical fallacy i heard one analogy let's say you have a dog and the dog runs into your house it's soaking wet and you know it's getting water all over your house and you're annoyed and you're like trying to figure out why is the dog wet but you're not outside you don't know why the dog is wet right so you say well the only reason is it must be raining so it must be raining outside and then you don't bother to go outside and look and check so now from then on you believe that the dog was wet because it was raining the reason why this is a logical fallacy is because you can't assume that there's other reasons why the dog was wet maybe your neighbor had a hose and sprayed the dog maybe that there was a puddle and the dog rolled around in the puddle maybe a truck drove by and somebody dumped some water on the dog me i mean you could invent any number of reasons from very plausible to utterly ridiculous but you can't assume that it was raining the problem i've noticed with most religions is that the reason they assigned isn't even the most likely scenario like for example you see it a lot in non-religious things as well like somebody sees a light in the sky and the first thing they think is it's an alien well how else do you explain that it's an alien and it's like well you know why don't we look at the more probable explanations before we just jump to these massive conclusions that's an alien you know like oh is there a balloon up there floating with a light on it i mean there's of course lots of explanations for that but what is it about people that immediately jump to one particular conclusion with no evidence and then believe that wholeheartedly and then at that point accept that belief with such rigidity that they will not accept any further explanation or evidence and so this is what i started to notice is that all of my christian friends didn't have reasons for what they believed essentially they believed it because it was true and they would make claims that it's absolute truth and i would say well how do you know it's absolute truth like what what possible reason would you have that that's absolute truth so another popular reason that i've heard is that you know i was depressed and i turned to god and he has healed me i'm no longer depressed i'm much more joyful and all that and to that i say well to be honest if a religion makes you more hopeful maybe that's a good reason to do it maybe that's a good reason to believe however statistically if you actually look at the statistics of religions a religion in general makes people happier more hopeful less depressed but the funny thing about it is it's regardless of the religion it's not one particular religion like muslims and christians are this equal amount of happy right so obviously you can't use that as a reason why your particular religion is true the reality is is that religion solves problems i actually heard one guy explain it like this if you look around at all the cultures in the world you have all these people that they were isolated way back when right you might have had people in like europe and people in like africa and like they weren't intermixing and the reason why is because they just had huge distances between them but yet they all invented similar things like they had heavy things to carry and so they all invented a way to carry heavy things maybe they invented a cart or maybe these people had like logs and they rolled them along or you know maybe these people had elephants and so they used the elephant too but the reality is there's a common human problem how do we carry heavy things and everybody created a solution to that problem so this is one explanation for why religions exist the reality is is there's a fundamental human issue and it's we all have these existential questions that are hard to answer what what what are we here for what are we doing what is our meaning like what is my purpose what happens when i die after i die will my life have meant anything at all and so his analogy was that this is the problem and human civilizations have come up with solutions to the problem and often these are the form of religions that's why every single you know little culture had in history had some sort of religious beliefs and his thought was that you know it actually solves these questions it gives you meaning it gives you purpose you know it solves your fear of death in most cases so you know when people say that to me now well you know i experienced jesus and then all these things improved and it's like well of course of course it did but that still doesn't prove it that just proves that you know you essentially took a drug it's the reason why frederick nietzsche said and i might be paraphrasing here but the two greatest narcotics are alcohol and christianity because if you drink a lot of alcohol or you take drugs it can make you forget about your problems and it might solve your problems by somebody's definition right and christianity does the same thing it answers a lot of the fundamental questions in your life so after going through this massive process of asking people because i wanted to find out if somebody had a better reason than i had because i had run out of reasons to believe i didn't have any left and so i had had personal experiences of course but i started to find possible other explanations for them like for example when you put on music at church and you feel those the goosebumps and you you know i was taught that that's the holy spirit well how come i experienced that with secular music as well at rock concerts or whatever the reality is this music touches us on a certain level as human beings and we can actually have neurotransmitter you know releases like dopamine and serotonin with just having music so you know because i had this experience along with some music at church and i felt euphoric and does that does that prove that the existence of god when i can have that experience outside of church the problem with experience is that there's often an arbitrary reason assigned to it and it's it's the reality is that's why science doesn't work on experience science works on facts science works on things that are repeatable science works on things that are demonstratable so the reality is this could i demonstrate god if somebody asked me to demonstrate god right now i can't and if i act you know to be honest i actually looked into things like does prayer work if you actually look at the statistics of prayer you would think if prayer was real that christian cancer would get better more often than non-christian cancer that christians will get into less car accidents the reality is there's there's actual research on this and it's there's no difference they've actually done studies where they pray for sick people and see if there's any change do these people get better and the people who don't have prayer do they you know get worse and there's just no evidence for it so really you know science runs on things that are repeatable and verifiable and i've sort of come to this place where i've realized that i can't prove that there even is a god i can't prove that the bible is true all the experiences seem very wishy-washy and i didn't want to lie to myself anymore so eventually i came to a place where i was just like i can no longer believe this is true so like what does that make me right does it mean i'm closed off to the idea that it could be true if somebody presented me with some real evidence could i change my mind and i would say definitely yes so along with this i've struggled for like years now what do i call myself i don't believe that anymore but i don't really believe it couldn't be true either i want to have an open mind i want to look at evidence i want to see what this evidence leads to i don't want to ever get into a place where i'm believing something based on something that's not evidence so for a long time i called myself kind of an agnostic i don't know basically i don't know what's going on but just lately you know as i research more into what these words mean and i look at the definition of a theist and that's a person who believes in a god a single god and then an atheist i think i was taught what an atheist means and i think it almost was incorrect but at its core what is an atheist an atheist is a person who doesn't believe in god i was taught that the definition of an atheist was a person that believes there's no god and there's a massive difference between those two things and so the real definition being a person who does not believe in god a person who isn't convinced a person who hasn't seen sufficient evidence yet to accept it as true but if reasonable evidence was suggested or demonstrated they could change their mind and so if i use that definition at this point in my life and i'm being honest with myself that is what i am i i am somebody that you know to be honest i want to believe i i think it would be cool if there was something more going on but i have no evidence to suggest that there actually is i have no real proof there is literally nothing that i can hold on to except for these experiences that when you really analyze them you can't verify them you can't repeat them there's no way to prove that they're what people say they are and then even then the experiences are interpreted and assumed to be something else and so i'm going to end with this clip bill nye you may have heard him bill nye the science guy he was doing a debate and at the very end so bill nye debating a theist specifically a christian theist and so in the end somebody asked this question what if anything would ever change your mind and both both debaters were able to answer this question and so bill nye basically said just one piece of evidence will change my mind however the christian he said basically there's nothing that could change my mind and i think there's a truth in those two answers i don't want to be the person that accepts something as true that can never update their beliefs because you you're basing your beliefs on this ancient text that doesn't change there's nothing that can happen at this point where things get added in fact it says right in the bible if you know nothing can be added to this book so no matter what happens in the world no matter you know what scientific discoveries that re-explain things you you really can't update your beliefs and i think it's put christians into really awkward places over history you know like galileo comes along and says the world is round and the christians accuse him of heresy and almost put him to death meanwhile an atheist and i was taught that atheists believe just as many things as christians they believe that there's no god and i i really do think that's a manipulation of what atheism is a theist a person who is not a theist it's like if i believe in the spaghetti monster and you don't you are not a spaghetti monster believer does that mean you have a belief just because you're not convinced and i think that's the core of what i've realized is that i'm just not convinced i haven't seen anything jehovah's witness contact me all the time and i'm not convinced they haven't given me anything mormons have tried to convert me and i'm not convinced christians try your evidence doesn't convince me i'm still open and willing to listen and if somebody presents a valid piece of evidence then i think i would possibly change my mind but until that happens i don't believe it and so i think at its core that makes me an atheist which is a weird thing to admit because all that word carries so many connotations but in the end i have to ask myself what kind of person do i want to be i don't want to be closed off to new things i don't want to be close up to new evidence i want to be able to update my beliefs as they come along and i think the thing that allows me to do that the most is calling myself a not theist an atheist and why am i doing this video it's not to like try to convert somebody change somebody's mind the real reason is as i've gone through this process it's been incredibly difficult and i've been you know as you change your world view you can it can create all kinds of problems a lot of those you've got a table with legs and you're ripping legs off your table and you're teetering i've gone through deep depressions existential crisises over these issues as i re-question the meaning of the world how do i resolve myself in this this world without these beliefs so the reason why i do it is because there have been a few key people that i've found along the way that have given me some semblance of comfort that i'm not alone that i'm not a crazy person for thinking this and so that's why i'm doing this video maybe there's somebody out there that this validates your own internal logic like there's things that you just you can't go along with anymore and i'm just here to say it's okay to think those things it's okay to explore what you think is true a lot of people can't do it most people can't once they accept a belief and it becomes part of their identity it becomes non-negotiable i don't want to be that kind of person so that's what this whole journey to me is about so thank you very much for checking out this video if you have any questions leave them below you can also send me an audio question as well and i can include that in a future video but i really appreciate you watching this far and i hope you have a great day talk to you later

Channel: Clay Arnall

Views: 215,136

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Id: idaRtqvOwm4

Length: 82min 45sec (4965 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020