"It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man."
Psalm118:8 KIV.
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There are many reasons why a person may question their religion, some noble, some for a more nefarious reason. The latter may use doctrinal issues as an excuse to pursue an immoral life.
When my wife and I left our religion, we decided to read The Gospels and The Book of Acts and systematically ask ourselves, what does God and Jesus require of us? This brought a great sense of freedom. For the last three decades, I had been spinning around like a Sufi whirler and never thinking of stopping, getting off and assessing my form worship. There would be guilt trips if I sat and watched a movie or went away for a day’s leisure. With no shepherding or talks and items to prepare, I had time to read God’s word independently without outside influence. It felt refreshing.
At the time, I read Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. She is a North Korean defector. The parallels between the North Korean regime and my religion were cognate. She wrote about North Koreans having two conflicting thoughts in their heads: a cognitive bias like trains travelling on parallel lines. There was the official thought that Kim Jong Un is a god, but the lack of evidence to support the claim. If North Koreans spoke publicly about such contradictions, they would find themselves in a treacherous place. Sadly, the force of the regime, as with the society I was associated with, is to isolate its own people completely. Take a few moments to read key quotes from Demick’s book on the Goodreads website at,
The Bereans
The Bereans were a devout group of religious people mentioned in the New Testament of the Bible at Acts 17:10-12. They lived in the city of Berea in Greece. They were known for their noble character and open-mindedness in receiving the message of the gospel, but they had conditions:
“As soon as night had fallen, the brothers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true. As a result, many of them believed, along with quite a few prominent Greek women and men.” (BSB)
They used their God-given right to question and check what they were being told. When I looked at my own religious beliefs, I found them wanting. It is not a sin, it is noble-mindedness and courageous to question why you follow some man made doctrines and rules.
I am often saddened when I see former members of my religion falling into atheism and taking up the current Western world’s occupation towards secularism. God has given us the privilege of being free moral agents. It is not the wise choice to blame God for the way matters turned out. The Bible is full of cautions about trust in man. Despite leaving, we are all still subject to the issue that was raised by Satan. Is it loyalty to God and Christ, or the Satanic secular zeitgeist that is currently sweeping the West?