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Cat Links deconstruction

Jesus the Atheist

Posted on gord

For a few months now, I’ve been having huge doubts in my faith. If you’ve followed my blog at all during that time you’ll know all about it, I’ve been pretty open. Growing up in the Christian Faith, I’ve seen and encountered God in undeniable ways. I’ve felt the presence of God being with me, I’ve seen and experienced healing and miracles as a result of prayer, and I’ve seen people’s lives transformed when they’ve encountered God. However I’ve also experienced times when it has seemed like God is absent, times when my prayers have not been answered. These last few months I’ve experienced the latter. My faith has crumbled piece by piece and the God I once knew feels more absent than ever.

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Cat Links atheism for lent, deconstruction

Standing in the Ruins

Posted on gord

I’ve never really felt like I fit into a box. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been different. The odd one out. The person that didn’t quite fit in. This has been a huge insecurity of mine for years, as a coping mechanism I often purposely push myself out of the box in one aspect of my life. Something that I can control, in order to feel like it’s my choice rather than just who I am. In school I was really involved in music, and was quite outspoken about my Christian Faith, in college I had a multicoloured mohawk, and more recently I’ve grown an outrageous beard. The theory is that if I define myself by these external things, it distracts from the interior insecurity that I don’t fit in.

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Cat Links Uncategorised

Grace and Acceptance

Posted on gord

Do we know what it means to be struck by grace? It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Saviour, or that the Bible contains the truth. To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace. Furthermore, grace does not mean simply that we are making progress in our moral self-control, in our fight against special faults, and in our relationships to men and to society. Moral progress may be a fruit of grace; but it is not grace itself, and it can even prevent us from receiving grace. For there is too often a graceless acceptance of Christian doctrines and a graceless battle against the structures of evil in our personalities. Such a graceless relation to God may lead us by necessity either to arrogance or to despair. It would be better to refuse God and the Christ and the Bible than to accept them without grace.

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Cat Links atheism for lent

Feeling Empty

Posted on gord

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’d meant to blog regularly about my journey doing atheism for lent, but I’ve found it extremely difficult to put into words what’s been going on. The readings have been extremely interesting. Honestly I’ve found a lot of them to be extremely difficult to read and get my head around, but perhaps that’s just because I’m not used to reading philosophy. I’m really looking forward to having some more time to read them again once the course is finished and understand them even more.

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Cat Links atheism for lent

Loosening My Grip

Posted on gord

I love travelling, as I write this I’m sitting in ‘Jardin Majorelle’, Marrakech. I’ve spent the last three days travelling through the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara Desert. In the mountains we saw the snow and threw some snowballs, before travelling to some traditional Berber villages and drinking copious amounts of tea. We then travelled to the desert (frequently stopping along the bumpy roads for cigarette breaks, chicken tagine and more tea), took a camel two hour camel ride from Merzouga into the Sahara and settled to camp for the night before heading back to Marrakech the next morning.

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Cat Links atheism for lent

Giving Up God For Lent

Posted on gord

Over the years I’ve given up lots of different things during Lent. Whether it be chocolate, Facebook or cake, I’ve had varying degrees of success. I’ve also tried to use lent as an opportunity to take something up, from reading my Bible daily, to doing a random act of kindness every day. This year, however, I’m trying something different. I’m giving up God.

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Cat Links deconstruction

Just A Book?

Posted on gord

I got my first Bible pretty much at birth, it was a big story book with lots of pictures of people wearing leaves, animals hanging out on arks and white men with beards. Years later I got my first “proper” Bible, one where nothing was missed out and there were a lot less pictures. However I didn’t really start reading the Bible properly until I was in my teens. Up until then it was a story book, it didn’t have a huge impact on my life and I don’t know whether I believed it held much significance to me. It was just a book.

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Cat Links deconstruction

Picking Up The Pieces

Posted on gord

I walked out of church on Sunday. After the talk, the leader of the service got up and asked if anybody who wanted to have a fresh experience of God wanted to come forwards for prayer. I went forward, desperate for something. Desperate to feel the love that I had felt so many times before, the closeness and presence of God that had once been so familiar. But I felt nothing. I tried not to hype anything up, I tried to make myself as open as possible, but as my friend prayed that I would experience the joy of God I just felt empty. I got back to my seat, the worship team kicked in with a song, and I felt a sudden urge to run. I grabbed my jacket and scarf and ran for the door, past my friends and out onto the street. I headed down the road and found myself sitting against a wall in floods of tears. I was a mess.

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Cat Links deconstruction

Ends and Beginnings

Posted on gord

As I mentioned in my previous post, in the last couple of years I’ve been on a journey of deconstructing my faith. The ways I looked at the world, the ways I understood my faith, God, religion and what that meant for me have been totally ripped apart. Safe to say it has been, and still is, extremely painful. The glass box shattered, my foundations were gone, in many ways the faith I had grown up with was dead.

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