From No Fucks Given to Christianity and Beyond, My Journey with Organized Religion

The Book of Balance part 3.1...

Author’s note: I intend absolutely no shade towards anyone who is Christian or believes in the Christian version of God. If that path brings you peace, joy, and hope, that’s wonderful.

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I have, throughout my life, been seeking truth. I’ve been told this is actually kind of normal per my astrology, which is fascinating on its own, but not what I’m here to talk about on this occasion.

I have always had a hard time taking religions seriously, even when I was religious. By default, I question everything, so even when I started to like the idea of having a god, I wasn’t convinced by the rules.

Nevertheless, my path looked much like this:

Mocking my cousins for having to go to Catholic church on Sunday while we stayed at the lake → surface-level Christian → atheist/don’t care → Christian who doesn’t like the bible/church much → atheist → agnostic → Apostle of Love.

Today, I’ll be covering that path up until I gave up organized religion, at which point I’ll continue in part 3.2!

Photo by Christopher Stites on Unsplash

Growing up vaguely religish…

My family had a bit of a confusing dynamic growing up. First of all, I have never had any reason to believe that my dad has any sort of feelings toward religion whatsoever. I am pretty sure he has no interest in dedicating any brain power to considering such things.

My mom’s a bit of a different case. She grew up fairly religious, but never made us go to church or anything like that. Nevertheless, I wasn’t allowed to say “oh my God” in elementary school, because it was taking the Lord’s name in vein. Also, when I did convert to Christianity (the second time, which was much more genuine), she said she felt some relief, because it was nice for me to have something to believe in. And, in the year 2025 — when I was over there going through my things before their move — she felt quite uncomfortable throwing a pocket bible in the garbage and chose to give it to the Salvation Army instead.

This created an interesting foundation for me growing up. God was treated as something that probably existed and was at least to be respected, but there wasn’t any talk of the bible whatsoever. As I briefly mentioned, when we spent our summers at the cabin, my cousins all had to put on their suits and dresses and go to church on Sunday mornings while the rest of us lounged on the beach… church was never interesting or tempting.

Plus, I recall a cousin having a Catholic wedding once in my youth and the ceremony was 4 hours long and I had nothing to do to amuse myself. To this day, I recall feeling like that event was torture for a child.

All-in-all, I was fortunate to have knowledge of a god but without any sort of strict indoctrination on the subject, which gave me the freedom to pursue my own answers.

My first foray into Christianity…

To confess what a generic dweeb I once was, I admit that both of my forays into Christianity were largely for the purpose of getting certain boys to like me.

I met a pair of twins in grade 9 (Canadian freshman year) who had recently moved to town and who were surprisingly nice to me considering I wasn’t very cool. Maybe it was because they lived in my neighborhood? Either way, somehow I ended up coming to their youth group with them once and I met a guy who was just as short as I was (I never did breach 160cm/5’3”), so we obviously connected over that.

So, I attended the youth group in good faith and explored the idea of a god and church a little bit. Ultimately, I don’t think that relationship lasted more than 5 weeks — I think he liked me well enough, but he dumped me when he found out that his best friend had feelings for him.

I still attended the youth group for a while. I enjoyed the feeling of connection and community. But, ultimately, I didn’t enjoy watching my ex constantly making out with his bff, especially since we never did more than hold hands.

Then, there was another guy who was interested in me, who I did not reciprocate because I was uncomfortable with him being a year or two younger than me. I recall him being inordinately bitter about it, especially considering I had just gotten out of my first relationship ever.

After a while, I just stopped going. The “god” part of it wasn’t pull enough for me.

The unthinking in-between years…

I couldn’t tell you if I considered myself Christian in this era or not. Much like my dad, I think I just didn’t put any serious thought into it because I had no reason to. The church was fine and all and the idea of a god who loves all his children seemed nice, when I had gone for those few months, but I already had some questions about the bible that Christians sure as hell didn’t want to answer.

However, I did struggle with making friends in high school — largely because I didn’t want to be friends with people who were assholes — which led me to reconnect with some friends from elementary school. These girls were all born-and-raised Christians who had been going to church together since they could remember.

They were never especially pushy with me, which was probably how they managed to convert me slowly. They were just the most fun people to hang out with at school. They liked art and music and God. I liked those things too, just I preferred Iron Maiden to their Jesus music. I credit myself for getting them all into classic rock (they’re still big Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin geeks, from what I know), and admittedly, I thought DC Talk and POD were pretty fun.

I started coming to youth group with them, though I still rarely attended church itself. Eventually, they brought me to the Youth Conference, which was a big gathering in Edmonton, AB, at the Rexall Stadium. It was pretty much a Christian convention, where there were some bands like Toby Mac and POD — the cool ones that got teenagers hooked.

I recall being in that stadium, listening to the music, cheering along with thousands of others, and having a feeling wash over me. I wondered if it was God. I embraced it and it felt good.

There was also an interesting matching group of boys. There was a big guy that my big girlfriend was into, a geeky guy that another friend was into, and a proper guy that another friend was interested in. That left a kind of cute guy for me, and I happened to like him the best. However, he did admit to me that he liked me but he wouldn’t date a non-Christian.

Also — side note — I only actually have one memory of this guy and in hindsight it’s pretty fucking lame… I said, “I have to go pee, be right back,” and his response was, “eww, why would you say that? That’s disgusting.”

… Umm… everyone pees, my guy. Get over it.

Well, anyway, I returned to my regular life, pondering this experience for a week or two, and ultimately decided that I would give Christianity a genuine chance. After all, I’d been going to youth group with my friends for a while now. So I converted.

The day I got baptized was… umm… interesting, to say the least. I had somewhat recently got back together with my first love, who was atheist. I brought him and my parents to my baptism.

First of all, the sermon at church that day was… offensive, to put it politely. It was basically saying that atheists and non-church-going Christians didn’t feel real feelings and weren’t real people. Soooo, everyone I brought with me was personally insulted by this sermon.

Then, there was the youth leader and a few youth pastors. I was very close to one of the youth pastors and I wanted him to baptize me, but the church wouldn’t let him and I had to let the youth leader do it. He was a creepy weirdo and I was never very fond of him, so my comfort levels plummeted.

Ultimately, I didn’t feel good or nice or close to Jesus or anything like that after getting baptized. I felt weird, judged, and very uncomfortable.

To this day, I still plan to visit Lake Katuma in Finland, where apparently the pagans rushed to wash off their forced baptisms. It’s been on my to-do list for about 16 years now. That baptism was just… no good.

Oh and hey, the creepy old pastor who told everyone I cared about that they had no value? He turned out to be a pedophile with a bunch of child pornography on his work computer. He was fired, but just went on to get a job at another church.

There’s also one more thing that I should mention, which was those youth pastors. Here’s where it was interesting… when my girlfriends were bringing me to their youth group before I was Christian, everyone was so welcoming and friendly.

Why, then, were they all SO hostile to my first love when I brought him? They had converted me, so I would have thought that they would be equally enthusiastic to have more fresh meat.

That, however, was not the case. My first love got endless side-eyes, sneers, and judgment from the youth pastors, who literally looked at him with a “eww, what did she drag in” look on their faces half of the time. And my first love was a deeply insecure fellow, so I don’t blame him one bit for feeling ostracized.

Also, that youth pastor that I was close to… apparently everyone (my parents included) found him creepy AF. To this day, I will swear that this man never touched me or did anything that I found shady or creepy. He lived two blocks away and he had kids, so I would go hang out with him once a week or so: I’d play with his kids, we’d talk God, and I’d come home. I had a worry-wort mom, so I was always on alert for pervs, and he never came across as one to me. But apparently that was not the case with other girls, so it seemed there was some alarming grooming going on that I miraculously managed to escape.

That was Deer Park Alliance Church in Red Deer, AB, if you want to avoid it.

Yeah, can’t say I had much good experience with churches in my hometown.

Leaving my hometown and trying a new church…

After I left my hometown and moved down to Calgary, I ended up with a Christian boyfriend who went to a Presbyterian church. This was the best church I ever went to, but even then, I had some issues.

Pros were that the priest was actually great. He wasn’t a pervy creepy hypocrite. Whenever he was talking, he felt engaged. He was preaching to himself as much as anyone else, rather than from an elitist position like the old pedo from DPAC.

Cons? Well, my boyfriends’ friends’ dad was one of those Christians who was away most of the year on missionary work, but when he came back, he was one of the youth leaders and would lead worship at church.

I always hated worship. I never felt comfortable singing and when I went to church with my friends in Red Deer, I would usually show up after worship was over because it made me more comfortable. When this guy was back, he would look around the room and he would find people like me, who weren’t engaging up to his standards, and he would stare with these way-too-intense eyes that said, “why aren’t you singing? Don’t you love Jesus? What the fuck is wrong with you? SING!”

So despite my metalhead guitarist boyfriend and his metalhead drummer brother being in the worship band and thus making the music not a total drag, I’d avoid the church like the plague if that man was back from his missions. I eventually stopped going to church at all again, which I’m sure mortified my boyfriends’ parents.

Needless to say, I never really liked the church. It felt like a place of extreme judgment and I really just couldn’t get behind the idea that this God would be so… petty. If something was truly omnipotent and transcended… why did the bible always paint this entity as such a babychild?

I ultimately came to the conclusion that God was probably real but the bible was written by men, so I decided to dump the church and the bible and explore a real connection with God myself, how I wanted. So long as Jesus was still my savior, God didn’t really care if I went to church or not. That was for Him to judge, not the churchy hypocrite assholes anyway. I didn’t feel comfortable believing in a God that forgave murderers and rapists just because.

If I was going to believe in any god, I was gonna figure out what that god really was.

Having my own relationship with God…

Moving to Finland was a fabulous excuse to stop going to church, because there were pretty much no English churches here, and my new metalhead friends weren’t Christian either, so I just casually stopped giving a shit.

Sauna became my church, when I was an Au Pair. My host family had sauna as a bathing ritual pretty much every night. It was usually one of my jobs to go down and get the fire started, which gave me permission to go first usually, and more often than not, I’d go by myself (sometimes my host family’s little girls came with me, and sometimes I went with the Estonian construction workers from my host father’s company, who were about my age, but this wasn’t too often).

When I was in the sauna on my own, I would commune with God. I would talk about what was going on with me and my friends, and I would send strength and love to people I cared about. I asked for little to nothing, as I thought that was hubris. I wanted only to send strength to people who needed it.

This ritual was the closest I ever felt to God. It was personal, intimate, and I felt like God was right there in the sauna with me, sitting on the bench, listening and hearing me.

After leaving that post, I don’t think I ever felt the “presence of God” again.

The slow fracturing of Christianity over time…

For the next 7-8 years, Christianity died a slow and painful death in my heart.

First, I started to get more interested in science and started to see the ways in which Christianity resisted logic and progress.

Then, I started to read about how the white dresses in our weddings were to represent women’s purity and virginity, which I found disgusting.

But worst of all, I read stories about purity culture and how severely it damaged a lot of women. I read terrible stories on blogs about women who were so thoroughly entrenched in religious shame over their sexualities that even by the time they were married and in love, sex still felt so bad and wrong and dirty that every intimate moment that they felt obliged to give their husbands felt like rape.

And, naturally, because of the internet and the fact that most of my friends back then were intelligent people who were also atheist/agnostic, I started to hear about all the flagrant contradictions and alarmingly abusive practices in the bible. I understood that queerness was a natural thing, so why was this religion, this “God,” telling me that some natural attraction is bad because of… no good reason whatsoever.

To me, a god worth worshipping had to be a god who loved everyone.

The whole “organized religion” aspect of it died out pretty fast after I moved to Finland, but the spiritual shift took much longer.

Ultimately, there was a straw that broke the camel’s back for me though.

When I first moved to Finland, I met The One. You know, you had a legendary meet-cute, you had an instant connection, and they happened to be everything you never dreamed could exist in a person. I was super in love with this dude for years.

Even though he breadcrumbed me, sexually coerced me, and, after that abuse, treated me like shit for a few years. I understand him as a person very well and I don’t think any of this was actively intentional (he ain’t the sharpest crayon in the box out there), but I also didn’t enjoy being the shattered victim of his personal growth journey.

But he was THE ONE. Most of us ladies have been indoctrinated to looking for The One and when we find them, it doesn’t matter how abusive they are, we want to be with them. After all, that’s what all the rom-coms taught us, right? Things will start with intense passion, something rough will happen, but then it’s happily ever after from there on out.

Right? … Right!?

Wrong.

I spent a solid 3 years praying regularly for release. An answer. If this was my The One, why were we not together? Why were we barely in contact at all? I wasn’t even asking for us to be together though. My prayers had no personal desire for a specific outcome. I was just asking for closure. If he and I weren’t going to be a thing, could I please know that? Could it just be over?

I never got that.

I tried to get it actively. I let God do it passively. Nothing ever satisfied my need for closure. Even sitting the guy down and listening to him pretend he wasn’t into me gave me nothing of value.

“Ask and thou shalt receive” was one of the main doctrines I was always taught as a Christian. If something is truly important to me, God will answer. Before this, I had always been able to find God’s will in everything. I never asked for much when I prayed because I genuinely believed in that scene from Bruce Almighty:

In the end, I realized that I would not get over this guy unless I actively wanted to. The fantasy of him had gotten me through some hard times with my partner, but things were going better now. I did not need this fantasy any longer. I needed to decide for myself whether I was going to casually pursue this asshole forever, or let him go and focus on enjoying what I had.

I made an active decision to forgive this guy, thank him internally for everything I learned about myself and life and love through this devastating near-decade, and move on.

In the end, God didn’t give me closure. I gave it to myself. And in that, I realized that Christianity was, and had always been, an outright lie meant to control and homogenize us into people who don’t think and just obey.

And that was never who I was meant to be.

Agnosticism, and a blossoming spirituality…

While I’m sure I went through my “fuck Christianity and fuck your God too” phase after officially declaring myself an apostate, I had felt enough things as a Christian that I didn’t want to outright rule out the possibility of a god.

I was just super done being told by unimaginative old men from thousands of years ago what that god was. As far as I was concerned, those old men had no fucking clue what they were talking about. They were just making up doctrines to enforce their control. And I still believe that to this day.

There was also one other thing that I made note of, that changed everything.

Remember how I said that I felt the spirit of God at youth group sometimes? I also felt that same thing at the Youth Conference and once in a while in other social settings. But I felt it the most in the sauna, as I said.

However… that same spirit? I’ve felt at Iron Maiden concerts and festivals. And the closeness of the sauna? I’ve felt that deep connection with anything I genuinely dedicate time and energy to.

I do not believe I was feeling the spirit of God at church or during worship — I was feeling the spirit of community, togetherness, shared consciousness. I do not believe I was feeling the spirit of God in the sauna — I was simply dedicating an hour of my life, nearly every day, to reflection and enforcing love and kindness in myself and what I put out in the world.

Those feelings that felt like God were quite easily explainable by other things, thus leaving me with the frank factual knowledge that God had never offered me anything I couldn’t do myself.

So, I wanted to explore other things. There were so many religions and everyone who believes them doesn’t seem to view them as a lens through which they can learn and grow. They generally seemed more like doctrines for ruling and oppressing one another.

I wanted to explore what these religions had in common. I learned a bit about Eastern religions, like Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, but found myself even more drawn to older, pagan beliefs that connected mankind with nature.

That, and the tragic loss of my adoptive son, were what drew me back into spirituality, but I’ll address that in part 3.2!

Thanks for reading, my friends, and stay balanced

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Author’s Note: If you think you might enjoy a world where there are no major religions and god is thought to be little beyond an entity of pure love, consider checking out this sample of my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles, where all of my balanced morals take the forefront in the worldbuilding! Volume II is set for release on August 22nd, 2025!