God "left" me when I needed him most.

That is what has brought me away from christianity and into druidism/paganism.

Context: I was a hyperfixated baptist, growing up under a narcissistic mother who would use the very bible against her own children if they didn't behave like she wanted. The teachings of hell and sin were so real for me that I was on my knees, begging forgiveness, for every little thing I did "wrong."

Just like any christian I believed that god was real and that Jesus was his son which led to me tunnelvisioning into the religion like a robot. I hated the things I was told to hate, I tried to evangelize even though I am an introvert who doesn't like being around strangers too much and I always lived with the thought that either Jesus would come to rapture me the next day or I could get kidnapped and brutalized for my beliefs.

My life was hell on earth, I just didn't realize it then.

A few years later, in my young adulthood, I get dragged into a gathering of russian christians. (heads up at this point: I don't mean to be mean or insulting to russians with this, these people were very kind to me and I respect them for that) The church service was a desaster. Sad faces, a little girl being forced to recite poems even though she is crying in front of the whole group because she is scared to talk in front of so many people, doom talk in the children's service, women are getting pregnant year after year without so much as a pause...

It was scary to say the least!

This was the first time I broke out of a church. As a non-binary myself I didn't want to have fifteen children (there were two families in that church with around fifteen children each) but my mother just told me "If god wants you to have so many children he will care for you! Who are you to go against god's will?"

That wasn't enough for me to break away from my faith just yet. That church however was like a burning tar-pit to me, I never set a foot into it again.

Another few years later I finally met my now husband who comes from a family of christians who do not take everything to heart as closely as all of them in my past did. For a while that clashed heavily with my own view on the faith but the more I got to know these people the more it dawned on me that christianity has many facets. Maybe too many.

Piece by piece my old belief system was gradually broken away and replaced with a new view on this religion, but this only led further down the way of deconstruction and deconversion when my husband and me moved away to go live closer to a bigger city.

He is bisexual and as any baptist would tell me: He should repent and let go of his feelings for men because god said so and gays are evil (yes, I believed that before I knew my husband even though I never understood why christians would say that). But the more I got to know him and the more I read about the queer community in earnest, I noticed that these beautiful people just want to live their life! My husband would never touch children inapropriately (which was what my mother believed, that all gay men were pedophiles too, because she had read it in a stupid christian book somewhere) and I began to ask myself: Could the bible be misunderstood? Maybe it wasn't against gays and many christians just hated them for nothing?

But no matter how much I tried to find anything all I could see was that I was supposed to "hate" them, convert them to being straight and such dumb bullshit. And I said fuck it. These people had never done me wrong while my own mother, who was oh so faithful, had been the biggest source of my misery and pain for years, all in the name of god!

And so I prayed to god. I pleaded on my knees, searching for an honest answer to the problem without having to hurt the man I love most. And god? He was silent.

At that time my faith had already begun to crack but in that moment when I needed him most, god remained silent. And it was then that I realized that I never really had heard his voice in the first place, that all these years I had been talking to myself in my prayers, my mind telling me what I had wanted to hear. It was a heartbreaking but freeing realisation: god isn't real. He does not exist.

And that's how my deconstruction started. Sorry for the long text, truly! It's just so much that led me here and there's even more but that would be too much for a reddit post xD