Faith Is the Practice of Self-Delusion

By K.E.H. x REV.

Faith Is the Practice of Self-Delusion is about how I came to realize that I had been deluded to believe in the presence of an entity hovering just above my head that the heavy-handed church elders assured me was a god. I was fifteen years of age and like any gullible teenager I enjoyed the church attention I was getting and all the loot of heaven promised that I could get by faith. The well-worn pathway to healing through college education and a life of skeptical thinking and reading is explained in the two-hour read of my book. So...please let me share this short autobiographical journey with you that freed me from religious fear and guilt to a life of joyful wonder and discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jun 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886047455

Book preview

chapter one

Looking for Truth in

All the Wrong Places

Faith, as the Good Book reads, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For many decades, I foolishly let this verse excuse every prayer unanswered, every tall tale of Holy Writ ever written, and every believer’s poor explanation of the most ridiculous assertions of the Christian religion.

As briefly as I can, I wish to record my life’s struggle through the senseless maze of Christian experience as it was presented to me by a bunch of Biblical proof-texts wielded by heavy-handed church authorities, beginning when I was fifteen years of age. My first trip up the aisle to the front of the church, while with every head bowed and every eye closed and the organist playing Just as I Am, I took my first step to get born again at my young age and was subsequently followed by many more similar trips throughout my maturing years. Yes, like most everyone else in the church, I was born-again-again. These trips to the altar usually occurred when the evangelist would come to town for a week of revival meetings or when our pastor would wax eloquent and lay a heavy guilt trip on the congregation followed by an altar call. We were a small church of seventy to eighty people on Easter morning; otherwise, we prayed about the small turnouts on Sunday mornings to no avail.

This first year of my born-again life was smothered in Biblical teachings in Sunday school before morning service when the whole church met back together for hymns, prayers, offering collections, announcements, and a sermon. I was constantly assured by church authorities that everything in the Bible was literal truth and, as such, could be approached as a historical account of how the earth was made, how God made humans from dirt, and how humanity fell from grace in the Garden of Eden and was in desperate need of a savior called Jesus. After a whole lot of begetting along with a global flood, fire from heaven, manna, a forty year walk through a desert, and lots of angels, along comes the New Testament with the teaching, of all things, of a virgin birth, walking on water, and a resurrection.

I was strongly admonished that to rely on my own reasoning would open my soul to the Devil and cause me to doubt, because, after all, the Devil was the father of lies and if I were ever to doubt, I would be risking my eternal soul to the torments of the everlasting flames of Hell. Whole sermons were preached on the evils of this world and how we Christians were strangers in the land and were separate from the fallen human race through the miracle of the new birth. Only the born-again Christian, guided by the Holy Ghost, could understand morality and know right from wrong. We were taught that all of humanity were degenerates and the thoughts of their hearts were continually evil from which we, the born-again, were redeemed and headed for heaven while they, the fallen humanity, were headed for a fiery hell after death.

Now, this is pretty heady stuff to indoctrinate a teenager with, and like many of my fellow church kids, we thanked God for saving us and providing us with a miracle book, the Word of God, able to answer all of our questions about the mysteries of existence and the meaning of life, along with blessed assurance that God had a plan in the Bible for each of us, the saved, in this lost world of pain and debauchery, along with the promise of a mate, and the bonus of everlasting life in paradise. All that was required was that we believe, that we maintained our faith by believing and obeying every word of the Bible and leaning not on our own understanding, for we were told that without faith, it was impossible to please God.

It was the search for truth that led me into Christianity by getting born again into the Fundamentalist branch of American Protestantism called the Holiness movement of The Free Methodist Denomination. However, my search over the years eventually led me through a study of all the branches of Christianity, Catholicism, and Protestant alike, and their place in comparative religion until I finally had enough and jumped down from the entire tree of religion, not looking back, to walk uprightly as a fully liberated human being. I was free of religious magic, free of religious guilt, and most importantly, free of the superstitious belief in the carrot and stick goal of heaven and hell after death!

The very search for truth that had led me into Christianity, after forty years of ongoing growth in maturity and a college education, led me to freedom from Christianity through a gradual awakening to reality. This sometimes dismal and often painful journey into stark reality did not happen overnight. The cognitive bias from a childhood of religious environment coupled with a teenage encounter of born-again-ism of the protestant recruitment process certainly caused me a load of fear and trembling as I took steps to break free of this demonic possession!

chapter two

Evolving

The year was 1965, and I was in college at age twenty-five, where I was exposed to the adult world of science and invertebrate zoology, among other things. Now, we were always taught in church that evolution was a lie from the Devil and had no basis in truth; evolution was just a theory with no proof. Contrary to what had been told by the religious authorities of my church, my college textbooks gave very detailed and solid proof of the facts of evolution; facts that could be demonstrated through repeatable experiments and by hard earned research of many scientists. For the first time, I had real information that told me from where we came as a species that needed no religious fantasy tales about mud pie people, talking snakes, and Adam’s rib!

Not long after, I found that the Christian’s compromised argument to the established