I was raised from my earliest memories as Christian. Being the brand of Christian that we were, we actually did things that most Christians don't, like keep the God mandated holy days listed in Leviticus. But despite those comparatively minor difference, we still held to the basics of Christianity: that God created everything, that humans sin against God and as such will be judged and sent to Hell unless they believe Jesus died so that they don't have to go to Hell.
Given that we kept Levitical holy days, you wouldn't be wrong to assume that my church cited Leviticus in condemnation of homosexuality. Of course that became a problem for me because I'm gay. It wasn't until I was 19 that I finally accepted it; until then I vehemently protested any accusations that I was and swore I was straight. For that matter, I truly believed I was straight. Hetero was natural. Homo was a perversion, an abomination. That I felt attracted to men meant to me that I was malfunctioning, and the reason I thought I was malfunctioning was because that's what Christianity taught. Being gay is a sin.
I can't begin to count how many times I had heard Christians in one way or another say that all gay people had to do is pray to God, and he'd set them free of homosexuality. So I did. I prayed every day for at least a year, but I remained attracted to men. With God being all powerful, my not becoming straight despite praying desperately for it had to mean something was even more deeply wrong with me than just me sinning by being attracted to men. I even had one Christian I talked to online about my struggle with homosexuality tell me that when I prayed to be straight, that since I remained gay, that I must just not wanted to be free of homosexuality enough for the prayer to count. I was desperate to be straight, so that made me think that I must be even more broken, more sinful.
I went through a period where I thought that God just wanted me to prove to him that I could overcome being gay on my own. That's when I started physically harming myself as a means to try to punish myself out of being gay. I would hit myself in the head repeatedly. I would scratch the entire underside of my forearms with my car key until the entire underside was one giant red welt. I once walked barefoot on hot asphalt for a mile, which caused nearly the entirety of the bottoms of my feet to blister and prevented me from walking without significant pain. I once bashed my shoulder repeatedly into a thick wooden fence post for an hour until I had a huge bruise on my shoulder and chest. But no matter how much I hurt myself, I couldn't make myself not feel attracted to men.
So, failing to be able to make myself not gay, and God not answering my prayers to be made straight, I was left with no other explanation other than God hated me for my being gay so much that he had totally turned his back on me. I must be something so evil that God won't make me straight since I begged him crying my heart out every night. And if I was that evil that God had turned from me, I knew I belonged in Hell. That's where evil sinners go, after all. So that's when I started contemplating suicide. I wasn't going to let someone as evil as I apparently was live. I belonged in Hell, and I was going to kill myself so that I would go there. Thankfully, I never full-on tried to kill myself; I could never think of how to do it that wouldn't leave a mess behind for my family to have to clean up.
I began to transition from Christianity to atheism when my then-girlfriend/now-best friend told me that she didn't believe God hated me for being gay. Until she said that to me, I had never, not even once in my entire 19 years of life, heard a Christian say that. I didn't know that the were Christians that didn't believe God hated gay people. It caused me to begin to question everything I had ever believed. What if everything I had been taught about God was wrong. And the more I thought about what I believed, the more none of it made any sense at all.
How could God be almighty, yet make humans flawed and then turn around and blame us for our flaws and plan on sending us to Hell if we don't believe that he incarnated himself so that he could die in place of our going to Hell in order to give himself a means of forgiving us if we believed the whole story. Why not just automatically forgive us; why the whole conditional redemption. If he was so almighty and so super-compassionate, then he wouldn't need anything whatsoever in order to forgive us. And if he is almighty, and thus all-knowing, he would have to know even before our individual creation whether we would meet his conditions for salvation, and thus he would have to know as he created us if he would send us to Hell; and that would mean that he specifically created some of us to send to Hell. That's sadistic. If he was so compassionate, why would he create suffering. If he didn't create suffering, then he's not the creator of everything.
Nothing I once believed made any sense anymore. And eventually I admitted to myself that I no longer believed in God. Sometime since becoming atheist, since becoming free from the hatred that Christianity teaches, I came across this quote from Epicurus that I think sums up the trouble with the concept of God:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Once I was able to throw off the hatred spawned by Christianity, I stopped having any thoughts of suicide. There is no judgement from the Creator of All Things who will torture me for eternity if I failed to obey. There is no sin. There is no Hell. There is no need for salvation. Christianity, with it's Holy Father target of worship, is very infantilizing. There is no boogeyman-like "do this or he'll get you". I've seen too many Christians say that atheists can't have any morality, but we're not the ones that think we have to be good in order to not get punished by our Father; we're good because we value being good. The same kind of "they're evil" statements I heard while growing up from Christians about gay people are the same kind of statements I've heard from Christians about atheists. And yes, not every Christian says such, but far, far too many do. Enough do that it wears me out. But unlike back then, it's easier to endure. Since I no longer believe in Hell, I'm not afraid of it. The only fear I have now is in Christians trying to harm me either directly or through using the government to legislate their religion into laws. And as I am afraid of telling people that I'm gay, I'm equally afraid of telling them that I'm an atheist because there's a good chance that they'll hate me and hurt me because of both.
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