religion, my history of it, my battle with it, and a recent (re-)discovery

it's been a while since i've posted something here. 3 weeks? i guess i've just been distracted with other things. i found a new passion for religion. i feel like that's a worrying statement for my non-religious friends, so i haven't talked to any of them about it quite yet. i'll talk about it if they ever prompt it themselves. or maybe they'll read this. i don't know. i've had a pretty tough relationship with religion. when i was young, i was an evangelical christian because i was raised that way. i never put in much thought to my belief, mostly out of fear. i could find contradictions in the bible. i questioned if god was really what he said he was, or if i was believing the right thing, or if god causes humanity to suffer because he is cruel, or if he even exists at all. i feared to dwell on these thoughts because i was scared that god would send me to hell if i questioned him. i knew the bible said not to rely on reason, and only to rely on faith, so did, blindly. but i wasn't blind because my eyes lacked function. i was blind because i had equipped a blindfold. i remember when i was young, my younger sister once asked my mom if my mom had ever questioned god. my mom gave a swift, terse, and harsh "nope." i didn't see it then, but it left a bit of an impact on me. i spent my religious youth feeling there was something wrong with me because i questioned god. i couldn't stop doing it. i couldn't help it. i tried to suppress it. as i grew, i found religion's role in american politics. i decided i was conservative because the conservatives seemed to like god, and their opposition didn't seem to like god. i found out about conservative bigotry. i found out about biblical bigotry. i found out that god seemed to be immensely more cruel than i initially believed. that his followers were cruel. but i didn't take off the blindfold. i performed mental gymnastics to justify cruelty. i erased myself. i erased my empathy and kindness. i erased my identity. i thought that my gender was chosen at birth and i would have to keep it forever. i tried to suppress my empathy. i told myself conversion therapy worked. that my desire to be feminine was a result of indoctrination that i had unknowlingly gone through. i told myself that liberals and leftists wanted to sexually assault kids and give them surgeries that they don't want. that was scary. deep inside, i knew it wasn't logical, because deep inside, i knew i was a girl who wanted those surgeries. but i kept the blindfold on. i ignored those thoughts i thought they were ungodly.

eventually, though, as i looked on the internet, i felt my views slowly challenged. i felt my blindfold tear. i found friends who were gay, friends who were trans, friends who were asexual, non-binary, every flavor of queer. i realized these people weren't evil. they weren't consumed by evil desires of lust. they weren't manipulated or indoctrinated. they weren't forced into surgeries or therapy. these were regular people just like me, but they didn't harbor a hate in their heart. i came to love these people and let go of my hate. friends came and went, faces changed, but i knew i loved who i had at any given moment. it got harder to remain evangelical now that most of my blindfold was taken off. eventually i told myself that god doesn't exist or we can't really know him. i abandoned christianity.

within recent months, however, i've been learning about something called gnosticism. i first found it through a youtube channel called esoterica. esoterica is hosted by a doctor who explores various esoteric traditions in history from a neutral perspective. i kept learning about gnosticism, and something about it appealed to me. the term "gnostic" is broad, and the first gnostics didn't call themselves that. they called themselves christians, but their beliefs are far different from evangelicalism, orthodox christianity, or even catholicism. because gnosticism is so broad of a belief system, it's hard to explain the whole of it concisely, primarily because a lot of the early religious sects that we would call "gnostic" today developed independently from each other, and their beliefs were only unified by a few core ideas. recently, a gnostic friend asked me how i would explain gnosticism in a simple way to someone who isn't familiar with it. i'll copy that explanation here. see below!

Gnosticism is a wide collection of spiritual beliefs and practices that were first practiced by early Christians who studied Biblical books that are not included in the modern Bible. These are its key points and ideas:

The material world is flawed because it was created by a flawed god called the Demiurge.
Above the Demiurge exists a good God with no flaws.
The Demiurge is equivalent to the god that appears in the Old Testament studied by Christians, and the Tanakh studied by Jews.
The good God is equivalent to the Father who Jesus spoke of.
We are trapped in the flawed material world by a cycle of death and reincarnation.
In order to reunite with the good God after death, rather than being reincarnated, one needs to find Gnosis, which means knowledge, or more specifically, hidden knowledge that saves.
It is not precisely explained how to find Gnosis, which is what makes it hidden. However, right living, prayer, meditation, study, and the contemplation of truth are all considered important aspects of the journey to finding Gnosis.

i already have writings that explain why i believe in gnosticism. i believe we can't have faith without reason. in other words, if we're able to find contradictions what we believe, regardless if it's religious, or we have questions that should be answered, but can't, we have to use reason to find the real truth. i'll share my writings later. they're in plaintext, not html, so i have to make adjustments before i publish them. goodbye for now, website!!

12 january 2025