Looking back at my life up until now, I can say there was one motivating worldview that dominated my thinking up until my mid-twenties, for the most part, from the age of about five years old. That "worldview", or perspective, was that of a "true believer" in "Jesus Christ". Christianity has been, and still is, in many ways, a massive part of my life story.
I have to write this in parts, because the subject is so multifaceted and intricate, in ways I am still realizing, and has impacted my life on so many levels, that to treat it as simply a "lightweight affair" would be doing the subject, and my own experience, a grave injustice.
As to my credentials, please refer to the following:
At age five, I "accepted" Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, through a prayer with my father in my bedroom.* I prayed to Jesus that I believed in him dying on the cross for my sins, and asked that I would be forgiven and that he would guide and protect me. I dedicated my life to Christ.
At the age of eight, I was baptized by my own request by the pastor of a charismatic church (Calvary Chapel of Ontario, California) my family attended at the time. As opposed to the more traditional Roman Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant version of infant baptism, this was "conscious choice" baptism, a-la Charles Spurgeon and the other great Baptist dogmatists.
At the age of twelve, I made a profession of faith in the Christian Reformed Church (the Ontario, California branch, now changed to a United Reformed Church) which allowed me full membership in the church/denomination which included the ability to take communion with the rest of the members. If you don't know anything about the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), they don't let non-members or children of members who have not professed faith to take communion. At least, they didn't when I professed faith all those years ago. However, they do baptize their babies, which is in contradiction to the above-mentioned Baptist way of doing things, but we can save some of that for later.
At the age of fourteen, my membership had been transferred from the CRC, to the Protestant Reformed Church (PRC), in Redlands, California. Coincidentally, the PRC denomination is an offshoot of the CRC. The reason why they split, if you don't already know, is really quite ridiculous on the face of it, but it actually explains much of what I witnessed during my time spent there. It was a brief four years, but intense. There will definitely be some information to share about this place!
At the age of eighteen, with my family (and, I might add, a couple of other close friends of mine) essentially being attacked on psychic, emotional, and mental levels, by members of the PRC, I decided to take a break from church, but still retained my Christian faith and belief in Jesus as my Redeemer and Savior. I owed my life to him, I just knew it. I did go to a Presbyterian church in Moreno Valley, California every now and then with my parents and sister (it's long gone now), and occasionally went on little "church dates" with my girlfriend at the time, to her parents' church in Riverside or to a charismatic, hip church called "Sandals" that was held at the California Baptist University in Riverside, California. Actually, I went to quite a few different types of churches in this period but nothing was ever true enough in "doctrine" for me. Even as a Christian, I was never very impressed with church, but thought it was something you more or less needed to get involved with in order to meet any like-minded, Christ-following people.
Fast forward to my first year in a new city, Seattle, and being invited multiple times by a few different people to a church called Mars Hill.** After a couple of years and some time getting involved, I became a member there. I want to say I attended from about 2004, very on and off, and started really getting involved in 2006/2007, around which time I became a member. I left at the end of 2009, after being exposed to what I thought was some really, really weird stuff going on (little did I know - it's actually at lot worse than I had imagined, come to find out...).
After Mars Hill, I was desperate to find a church I felt at home in. You see, since an early age, I had been studying John Calvin, Martin Luther, and all of the great Protestant and Puritan theologians (i.e. John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, etc.). These men were brilliant, no doubt, cunning even, and able to dive into a verse of scripture and spend pages talking about it's relation to other verses and themes in the Bible, comparing, contrasting, and all in all, reinforcing a very dry, legal, "pragmatic" view of the texts in question.
In addition to all the theology and Bible reading, I learned the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Confession, the Three Forms of Unity, not to mention, I still know a lot of Bible verses by heart, even down to variances in the translations. I've read through the Bible multiple times and multiple versions of it too.
Anyway, a few weeks after I left Mars Hill, I ended up attending a small, but affluent Seattle church called Grace Seattle, a part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). I became a member there after a class with other people and realized there were a lot of similar stories to mine. A lot of seekers. I did make some friends, and at the time was quite heavily into studying Christian theology and philosophy, in particular I was drawn to a school known among familiar circles as the "Federal Vision". This Christian dogma is based on the teachings of a few particular individuals, notably R.J. Rushdoony and a few of his friends, but is of particular interest when studying the control cult that Christianity represents (And, might I say to those who like to point out the atrocities governments commit, which they do, these people do it so much better and only further feed said governments with willing cannon fodder).
While I don't really have anything personal against anyone who attends or otherwise contributes to this organization (Grace Seattle), it was during my time spent at this church and the ensuing influx of actual relevant information into the link between Christianity and the esoteric, that became the "straw that broke the camel's back", as the proverb goes.
So, after a lot of self work and discovery, I determined that I no longer believed in the myth I had adopted as true, and chose to search out an alternative reality, which I'm sure must exist. Christianity is simply too hypocritical, schizophrenic, guilt-driven, and psychopathic for me to take it seriously at all anymore.
If you've read this far, and you're a Christian, and you want to try to convince me otherwise, go right ahead. It's not going to work. I don't buy it, thank you very much, and quite frankly I think at it's core, Christianity is possibly the most effective psychological warfare operation based on domination and control ever perpetrated upon what should otherwise be a free humanity. At least, it's creators were certainly of the "black magic" school of control, domination, and obsession with all kinds of cruelties and perversions - they wish to use black books to justify their behavior, and crosses with dead bodies hung upon them to announce their appearance.
If that's not a good start to a series on Christianity from a "True Believer" perspective, I don't know what is. It's why I included the picture at the beginning of my post. According to control freak people like John MacArthur, I was never a "True Believer" in the first place, despite the track record above - and actually, I'm quite happy, because I'm done "suffering for His Sake" (by the way, "sake" is related to legal action and criminality etymologically - why should I suffer because of what someone else's "legal" requirements are?) - and if ultimately, it's up to Christ's "Spirit" which "never fails", then I'm living proof that it does!
I can't wait to see the intelligence agency religious freaks troll this post and start calling me any number of things, bring it on you sick bastards. I've dealt with your kind before, it will be nothing new to me.
More to come.
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