That's very interesting. If you don't mind me asking, what caused you to move away from Christianity?
Ultimately, it was moving from a moderate and sensible church, to a rather more extreme one, and then struggling to deal with some of the consequences afterwards.
At the age of fifteen, when I first became a Christian, I joined a Baptist church that was quite lively and thriving at the time, and in particular got involved with a youth group, which was a really nice community to be involved in. I wasn't particularly happy at school or at home, and church became a haven of welcoming, supportive people that made my life a lot more satisfying and happy. Anyway, while I was in the sixth form at school, some of my Christian friends got involved in very charismatic stuff - so we're talking Pentecostal-style, God-working-miracles type things. At the time, the "Toronto Blessing" was a very big thing, and this was supposedly a supernatural revival in the church that would see God working in great power. People were getting into stuff like healing, prophecy and words of knowledge. I now consider it all to be nothing more than group hysteria, and the same sort of dishonesty you find in "mediums" who claim they can speak to the dead, but to a slightly naive teenager, this stuff looked
exciting, and I wanted a piece of it.
To cut a long story short, I spent my year out on a training/volunteering/mission programme with an organisation called Pioneer, and effectively I didn't really know I was pretty much joining a cult. All sorts of dodgy stuff went on that I only recognised as bad many years later, particularly the level of control that leaders had over us, and the complete lack of privacy we had. I was away from my friends and support networks, plunged into a very intense environment which was all about God 24/7, and where everything was viewed as a GIANT COSMIC BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. Every last thought I had was torn apart and made out to be an enormous big issue. I suffered a lot of what I would now consider to be religious abuse at the hands of these people.
When I finished my year, and attempted to return to normality, it was really hard to adjust back into normal life, and I got into bit of a mess. I ended up in another very authoritarian church, which left me feeling very uncomfortable, but I didn't really know how to get out. Eventually, I was feeling incredibly stressed and depressed every time I set foot in the place, and I had massive doubts about what I believed, especially because the church I was in was rampantly homophobic and extremely intolerant of just about every modern liberal view on society. I moved house and went to a church that was better in my new area, but I still found going to church to be very difficult and anxiety-inducing. I felt under pressure from certain people to keep going, though, so I did.
Eventually, I ended up working very long hours for a while and stopped going to church because I couldn't fit it into my diary. I didn't intend this to be permanent, but I never went back, because I realised I was (a) not having to sit there feeling miserable and stressed for two hours every Sunday and (b) the sky didn't fall in. Stepping back enabled me to take a long, hard look at my beliefs, and I realised that for some time, they hadn't been genuinely held, and I had serious doubts about a whole range of fundamentals to the faith. I began to realise later as well that my year out did me a lot of psychological damage, and really screwed up my ability to function properly in some ways. I'm actually having some counselling for that at the moment, and it's been pretty eye-opening.
Effectively, it's like a lot of things, which become damaging if they take over your life to the point where you lose balance and perspective. I have no issue whatsoever with moderate, sensible, liberal Christians, but unfortunately my experience with the more extreme ones has been so bad, that I'm not able to set foot in a church these days without having a panic attack.
I haven't even started on the mental gymnastics required to believe a million contradictory things at once, either. I'm glad to be free of that.