no free will in heaven

Outgrowing Religion

no free will in heaven

My family wasn’t particularly religious when I was growing up, although my parents did take us to church sometimes. When I got to high school, peer pressure became too much and I started going to church with my friends. Later I married a man from a conservative religious family. From then on, it was church twice every Sunday, and our kids went to the church preschool.

It was during this time that my old doubts came back.

When I was a teenager, I deeply pondered the whole issue of a divine plan vs. free will, and how prayer could possibly change this divine plan. Now, as an adult, these things made even less sense than before.

To make things worse, my mother was turning towards a Buddhist way of life, my father and brother were Atheists – and the thought of them going to hell was just more than my brain could contain. The question that haunted me most, was the belief that god had already chosen those who would go to heaven, even before he made the earth. I could not get my head around the contradictions: if everyone was already destined to be saved or not, how can people say you simply had to “choose” to accept Jesus as your saviour? And imply that you are a bad person if you “rejected” him. And what was the point of sending Jesus to earth and crucifying him if the chosen ones were already saved? I asked different theologians to explain this to me, and none of them made any sense –they all fell back on the old “god works in mysterious ways” line. I felt like I was doing mental contortions in order to hold all these contradictory beliefs in my head. It was exhausting. I remember one day saying to my husband, I don’t know what I believe anymore, but I do believe that Jesus existed. Not that he was the son of god, just that he lived. That was all that remained of this whole lot.

A few years later my family was involved in a freak accident during which my husband and daughter were critically injured. Both survived, against all odds, amidst prayers from all around us. Ironically, instead of praising god for answering these prayers (I wasn’t praying, I was too angry), I thought, “Why would god do such a thing?!” I was told over and over, god doesn’t do these things, but he “allows” them. That’s when the whole lot started unravelling. Fast. If god was “almighty” and in control of everything that happens, as everyone assured me, then he is heartless and cruel to let an innocent child suffer months of agony and be disfigured and severely scarred, from head to toe, for the rest of her days. For what???

Meanwhile, my husband also started rejecting his entire belief system after going through hell in hospital for months on end. After many visits from the Minister, I was finally compelled to say it out loud and in writing: I do not believe in Jesus, I am not a Christian anymore. I formally left the church. It was one of the best days of my life.

My thoughts were finally free, I could breathe. I went through a phase of calling myself “spiritual but not religious”, and later referred to myself as Agnostic. Gradually “there must be a god” changed to “I doubt that there is a god” and I quietly started thinking of myself as an Atheist. Now my biggest challenge is raising kids in a school which has a “Christian ethos” and teaches them that Christianity is the only TRUE religion and the only way to get to heaven. It’s not easy for kids of Atheist parents, but we talk about it a lot and I try to give them a rational, balanced view of the world, and we focus on doing the right thing, being a good person and having strong morals, which requires no religion whatsoever!

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