Today I spoke with Kyle Butler, who grew up in a Christian home and became a pastor for 16 years before critically examining the claims of Christianity, and ultimately deconverting.

As we talked through his story, we touched on topics like:

• Feeling the sense of urgency as he reached the age of 13, the age of accountability, to get right with god.
• Repeatedly questioning his salvation because he struggled with sin and wondered if he was just temporarily struggling or not actually saved.
• How Lordship Salvation teachings ruined his life.
• Why the church is so afraid to scrutinize its narratives and to admit they are wrong and don't work.
• Admitting that the Gospel is powerless to change lives.
• Hearing people give him prophecies from god about his life and about god's will for him.
• The sense that he had to obey god's will, or god would force him to obey through humbling hardships -- and the consequences could be very painful.
• The bizarre cognitive dissonance in Christianity of a god who hurts and tortures his children and is yet called a loving and good father.
• The Christian dynamic of having people become teachers even when they don't understand the background of the Bible they are teaching.
• How the endless versions and varieties of Christianity and the resulting confusion and lack of consensus lead to wondering why that deity would be so confusing, if he were real.
• Believing that god was the head of our lives, that our lives were in his hands, that he was in control, and that we need to follow his plan and fully trust him, and that he cannot fail.
• How Christianity demands an obsessive, consuming love for Yahweh, Jesus, and the Biblical worldview.
• How Christianity is debilitating and punishing to believers, on many levels.
• How Christianity is ultimately revealed to be merely another tool to scare, control, and manipulate people.
• The message that the divine presence is constantly watching and judging you and can even see your thoughts and intentions.
• Realizing that the concept of a loving god cannot be reconciled with the teaching about eternal conscious torment.
• How we, when we were Christians, would gaslight ourselves constantly into thinking everything was our fault -- not the fault of god or the Christian machine.
• The bizarre Judeo-Christian narrative that the shedding of blood is required for forgiveness to occur, that it pleased god the father to torture his son Jesus, and that he ultimately needs to torture and kill someone -- either Jesus or sinners -- to be appeased.
• How the Lord's Table / Communion is a form of cannibalism, where we symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of a dead man.
• The importance of not indoctrinating the next generation into religion.
• Realizing that every religion has a god or gods, and every religion has a book, and that religion thus nothing more than a man-made structure where everyone is claiming to have the truth.
• How religion steals the precious time we have in life.
• Finding that you are a better, much happier person after we move on from Christianity.
• Being able, after our deconversion, to respect people and treat them with much more dignity than ever could when we were Christians.

Many thanks to Kyle for sharing his story!

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Connect with Kyle!

Tiktok @kyle_talks

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Mentioned in this video:

Dan Barker's video, "You Don't Have to Go Down in My Basement"
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Tim may be reached by email at: harmonicatheist@yahoo.com

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--Tim

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Ending music by Eyal Raz, "Friends"

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