The Importance Of My Religious Experience

My Religious Experience My religious experience can only be described by first entering my thought process when I first heard of the assignment. I am still a little Christian girl in the blind eyes of my parents, and due to my safety I intend to keep it that way. I rewrote this paragraph several times, I relayed no information about this essay to my parents in fear they would want to read it, and now I hope it reaches its full potential as I 've finally decided to sum it up with a simpler phrasing: I 've realized my experiences center around the idea of hatred and fear. I grew up, like most in the American South, going to church every Sunday. I loathed it with every bit of my little body. From having to wear a dress to having to sit …show more content…
They would quickly shut me down and tell me that I was wrong, that I needed to repent and accept that God doesn 't give all the answers. My parents, especially my father, would always try to argue by saying things like “well, I’m trying to tell you what’s right, but you can keep believing all this worldly stuff and burn forever if you want.”. This method of shutting down all who question the validity of the bible would not stop here. Unfortunately, I discovered something else about myself that I couldn 't understand. When I was around eight I had discovered I was developing curiosities for girls, which wasn 't a good thing in the Baptist Church. I would soon develop an even bigger fear of Hell, something that always stays in the back of my …show more content…
I didn 't know what else to do other than to try and push my sexuality away with hatred. I became a very homophobic person, voicing my opinion throughout my peer group in hopes absolutely nobody would question I was anything but straight. I was terrified of the fact I could go to Hell, and it was reasonable considering the way that most, if not all Christian churches instilled the fact that homosexuality would send you to eternal flames. During these times my beliefs changed quickly from questioning, being chastised for ever having questions in the first place, religious superiority, and then more questioning as the same question rolled into my head: Why would any higher power put intelligent beings on a thing in the middle of an endless bigger thing and make them make a choice about whether or not he/she exists, and then condemn them to burn forever (a concept we cannot even begin to grasp) if they do not, or worship him for placing them in the situation in the first place if they do? I barely believed in the Christian mindset, but forced myself to try out of fear. My hatred for myself and how I had been born was strong. I had to change it, and I knew I couldn