As a Black, church was always the one thing you didn’t fuck with when growing up. My dad is a deacon, my mom is very active in the same church, and I have several aunts and uncles who are preachers.
With that said, I did everything I could to get out of going to church once I turned old enough to realize what the fuck was going on and started asking questions. At 16, I started working and told my manager to 100% schedule me on sundays because I was available. That was my excuse to stop going to church, and I really haven’t been back since 2001.
This has caused a few arguments between me and my parents, but I stood firm on my reasoning and they learned to live with it. There were times where my dad would tell me not to come back home unless I was prepared to go to church on Sundays, and I responded with “okay, I’ll leave and you will never see me here on a Sunday ever again.” Since that conversation, they turned a new leaf because I was serious and yes I packed up my shit that one Sunday morning and headed straight for Houston, no hug no goodbye no nothing.
I’m the only person in my family who doesn’t go to church—immediate family, cousins, aunts, uncles etc. I’ve only stepped foot in a church a few times the last 20 years to attend funerals, and that’s it. I won’t go for anything else.
My main argument is this—how am I supposed to believe this is a religion that shares all of these stories and fables yet the church is one of the most hateful groups I’ve ever seen? And isn’t judgment of others itself a sin? And I thought there were no degrees of sin, so why does 1 sin outweigh another? Doesn’t your hated of a certain group of people constitute sin and you should be judged as well?
No one can answer these for me so I I haven’t been back.