DECONSTRUCTING AND HEALING FROM EVANGELICAL INDOCTRINATION 

Step 2: CLOSING THE BIBLE

When you're born to a household with a Bible on the coffee table you don't stand a very big chance of reading it as anything but cold hard facts of life. Doubting a single verse is framed as dangerous.
But the Scriptures are this mess of mixed up morality, plagiarized myth, and authoritarian control.


Let’s look at Scripture within the context of its time, explore the nature of the god it gave us, and take apart the stories that subjugated us. Let's reimagine Jesus using what history tells us.


Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it—which always amounts to the same." Jacques Derrida

BREAK UP WITH GOD

"God is love" 1 John 4:8 insists. His love for us humans is so deep that he allowed his own son to die a brutal death so we could live forever per John 3:16. The same god created us with sin and doubt and prepared a place to torment us though. And he wasn't exactly full of love in the Bible. Maybe it's time to break up.

REIMAGINE CHRIST

What about Jesus? Who was this man you've spent your life speaking to, listening for, loving? Man? Myth? Son of God? Ditching Yahweh can be a relief, but Christ was your dearest friend. Perhaps he can join the other philosophers, thinkers, and inspirational figures, real or fictional, whom we admire and wish to emulate. 

SCRAP THE SCRIPTURES

Have you struggled for faith after noting Scripture inconsistencies and impossibilities passed off as historical facts? The mental gymnastics of compartmentalizing and dodging cognitive dissonance as we try to cling to faith in such a flawed document can be exhausting. Here's why we should scrap it.

REIMAGINE THE WORLD

When deconstructing from oppressive, authoritarian belief systems that lie to us about the world, we often have some catching up to do in order to better understand it. In the fundie fold education is often sneered at and viewed as antithetical to faith. Leaving faith behind means we can learn about and appreciate the world.

Continue to Step 3

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