Posted by:
praydude
(
)
Date: October 17, 2018 03:49AM
I’ve been out of the cult for over a decade now and I’m at the point in my life where I feel that it doesn’t matter if you believe in a god or not. Who cares if you don’t believe in the Jesus or if you believe that there is literally nothing out there doing anything? Perhaps god is a giant squid who created us on accident and is now getting ready to feed on our souls? Any less plausible than the super-benevolent being who wants us to return to him without actually doing anything for anyone? (And don’t give me the Jesus died for your sins crap because none of that actually happened).
I feel that we all desire to have definition on some level. We seem to have a need to belong to a group of like-minded people. We like our compartments, our boxes. We leave one box and quickly look for another one to jump into. Boxes feel safer. Boxes are comforting...but...perhaps a fundamental part of the human condition is that there is no way of truly knowing the nature or the existence of god. It is an open-ended question with no answer.
Groups, labels, and boxes can quickly turn into shortcuts to critical thinking. This seems to be a byproduct of living in a cult for a number of years. Cults are full of these types of reasoning; highly polarized, black-and-white, for us or against us. Labels serve this type of reasoning well.
In my experience leaving the cult left me feeling empty or void of personality since so much of who I was was handed to be by the cult. It has taken me years to get to where I am now and the further I get from the cult’s influence the more comfortable I am with the idea that no one really knows anything about the divine or the spiritual. This is just a part of our existence. A question we will never know the answer to.
I can’t count on god to save me. I can’t count on my government to save me either. You know what I can rely on? The people around me.