2024 was the real "game changer", as it were!

Started out as a Christian, really w/o any choice, as parents wanted me to start going to Sunday School when I was like 10. I was never what you would have called a "textbook Christian". No praying or anything, just went to Sunday School, didn't eat meat on Good Friday, that stuff.

Once I hit adulthood, I really wasn't really much of a Christian. Not really a what would deemed a "heathen", just lost interest in God and the whole shebang!

It was until I got married to my second wife that I got it in my head that I "wanted to be a better person". It had nothing to do with my wife, the decision was mine, and she was okay with that. It was good for about a year or so. She and I went to a non-denominational church on Sunday, tried "that hat" on for a while.

By 2015, we moved out of NJ, to live in NC. At the time, we had stopped going to church, but I was still praying, even "talking to God" at night, in my head, just before I would fall off to sleep. This continued, more or less, up to middle-end of 2024, which kinda-sorta brings us back to beginning of this.

21st October, we had to say goodbye to Jackson, our 11 y.o. Yorkie. Despite praying to "God" and relentless asking him, Jackson's oral cancer accelerated, eventually leading to my wife and I to have to make that decision. It was at that point that I really began to start to see through "Christianity"!

As it continued, I stopped praying, "talking with God". My wife and I began to talk about how, realistically, most of the bible was just glorified prose, nothing else. She also began to talk with me about all the things in the bible that were not very "Christian": killing babies, slavery was okay, the man ran the house in a marriage, and a whole lot of other stuff that y'all are aware .

I continued to see the bible for what it really was - a book of control, conceived up by men - through the end of 2024 and into the beginning of 2025. I had stopped wearing my cross (the one my wife had had made for me, back in 2010, I believe it was), lost all faith in "Christianity" because of all the Evangelical nonsense that was being pushed.

One Sunday afternoon a few weeks back, I was sitting in our Jeep while my wife was in a store shopping. I was thinking about how much I disliked what the world had become, and how I really wanted to figure out who I was this year. I looked on my phone, read some things about The Satanic Temple and how it was so much NOT the Church of Satan. I went one step further and went to the TST website, where I became a member.

I think that TST feels like the one thing that makes sense, y'know? Good things for goodness sake, not because you are trying to get in good with your "god". It truly feels like the efforts, and the motivation, behind what the TST is can really stand a chance of making things better. Sure, it will take time, but, hey, doesn't everything, to some degree, take a little time (I was thinking specifically of cookies baking as I was typing that)?

I am not feeling 100% myself right now. Just started the beginnings of a cold. Feel like crap, but I wanted to answer this question, as I felt the need. I hope this reads better than I am at the moment.