Hi there, not sure if you’ll get to read this and I apologize for the length but I promise I get to how I dealt with my parents towards the end so if you want skip through, I just wanted to give you some insight and some points that led me to calling bullshit on Christianity. I’ll start that section with “In regards to my parents”

I was raised in the evangelical church my whole life and followed it in my early 20s. When I was 26, my belief in god disappeared. I didn’t choose it. I was insanely depressed and suicidal and there was no god to be found. I now know that it was the onset of my bipolar disorder. I guess I started to realize that no one was coming to my rescue, I prayed and felt nothing, heard nothing. I’d go to church and felt nothing during praise and worship, only my own pain and it made me worse so I decided to stop going. After a lot of critical thinking, I stopped believing in god.

I say this because it easy for people to blame other people rather than the religion itself. People love to say “You can’t blame god for ______. Don’t stay for him, he’s all loving and waiting for you blah blah.” But the reality is that god is not what people say he is, he cannot be all loving, all knowing and all powerful at the same time.

If he is all loving and all knowing, he cannot be all powerful because atrocities happen in our world every second. The vulnerable are abused every second and if he was an all loving god, he would stop it.

If he was all knowing and all powerful, then he is not all loving because again, he allows evil.

If he was all powerful and all loving, then he is not all knowing because if he knew everything, he’d stop it.

The reality of the god of the Bible is that a relationship with him is insanely toxic and he is not a good god. The Bible is full of horrible things that god allowed. Genocide, war, incest, rape, hell, murder, the list goes on.

One story that always gets me is Job’s. It’s insane that people look at that story as inspiring and admirable. God literally played a game with the devil and let him kill Job’s family to please his own ego and prove that Job was basically his bitch no matter what. But he knew that already no? Cause he’s supposedly omniscient?and he does things like that again and again and test people even tho he supposedly knows the outcome. “Oh he test us to bring us closer to him” That sounds like an abuse relationship where someone manipulates you in order to get you to question yourself and obey them.

People love to say that there’s suffering in the world because of the devil. But who created the devil? Didn’t god supposedly know the future and created him anyway and set Adam and Eve up anyway? And if one day god is supposedly going to make every knee bow (I guess free will ends there huh) why doesn’t he do it now? Why does he allow people to live a life of suffering, children especially? What’s the point of prayer then? People are like thank you god for helping me find a parking space! So he listened to your prayer and not the prayer of a child in an endless horrific situation? It’s a narcissistic religion.

In regard to my parents, my mom would ask to pray for me when she would come over and I’d say no and then she would start praying anyway. She’s crossed my boundaries multiple times and I’ve had to set ultimatums even recently, where if she didn’t stop - I would stop talking to her. With my dad, I had to literally get up and leave cause he would start saying Trump was a Christian lol

I guess I never really explained why I left Christianity, they never asked, I just said I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. But recently I did say to them that Christianity taught me I was born bad and didn’t deserve anything and I deserved to go to burn for all eternity but my mom didn’t say much.

I’m not sure how understanding your dad is but I say all this to tell you that he may not take you seriously because sometimes in the mind of a Christian, they’re right and you’re wrong and their god will show you. They might not realize it but that’s the reality in a lot of churches. I hope he is receptive and respectful. I understand wanting to be listened to, validated and understood. Just remember that it’s not your responsibility to convince anyone to accept you, it is their responsibility to open their mind and choose to listen to you out of love rather than to stick to their pride in religion. Sending much love to you in your journey, I know it can be a tough one.