Adverse Religious Experiences Support Thread

We grew up quite similar. I, too, grew up evangelical with a Pentacostal bent to it.

The good news is that I got to grow up homeschooled as a result and didn’t have to suffer through 8 AM to 4 PM schooling like the other kids, which might have wrecked my ADHD brain. That spared me a lot of stress. The bad news is growing up constantly being gaslit, being told to accept and believe and forgive false teachings indefinitely.

I also grew up with a fear of hell. In fact, it was so ingrained that any time I burned myself, such as on a hot stove, I would immediately think, “That was only 1 second, but Hell is trillions of years long.”

But it was really the constant erosion of reality that wore down my brain. I grew up in a religious, somewhat cult-like organization that had books teaching things like, “If you put rice grains in two jars, and you speak blessings to one and curses to the other, the blessed one will remain white while the cursed one will turn black.” Even my devout-charismatic friend thought that was insane.

I had posted about this in another thread, but eventually, what got me to deconstruct was realizing that I was being forced to apply a double standard to everything. Christianity was to be held to the lowest of standards of evidence, while everything non-Christian was to be held to a tough, high, standard of evidence. One moment that stands out in my memory is, as a sports fan, realizing with a jolt one day that I could more easily find statistics for an NBA game - complete with box score, rebounds, three-pointers and roster names - than I could for the evidence of God or events in the Bible.

As someone already dealing with mental illness (OCD,) the thing a mentally-ill person needs the most is a strong, stable core of reality. But the more I asked my mother to stop being irrational (because her irrational behavior was making my OCD worse and eroding my pillar of reality,) the more she continued on craziness. She started talking about “the courts of heaven” (this notion that you can behave like an appellate or petitioner in heaven with particular procedures,) talking about her belief in Sadhu Selvaraj (a charlatan Indian Christian,) Kevin Zadai, etc. I was fed a constant diet of nonsense, like hearing preachers saying “I tell all the children here that they will never be sick for one day in their lives” (paraphrased). She also said, “If Biden wins (in 2020,) you can forget about being able to go to church again.” My OCD got to the point where I began connecting all kinds of things together and thinking all sorts of things were God punishing me for this or that.

I’ve always been a late bloomer, so it’s unsurprising that it took me 1-2 decades later to deconstruct than my siblings (who were much more astute and deconstructed far sooner.) But better late than never I guess.