Deconversion and the Transformation of God

I was just reading about deconversion from Christianity on a deconversion site, and it got me to thinking about my process of deconverting. Many deconverts said that they lost faith in God and heard no answer from God, so they were forced to leave Christianity. While, during my search and transition, I have not lost God- God just keeps changing. Perhaps because I have never been a complete deconvert or perhaps because my idea of God wasn't built out of concrete. I have lost my faith, it has staggered and fallen under the weight of God's incompetence. Yet, if I change the meaning of God, and change the meaning of faith and change the meaning of life, and what is "good" and what is "bad", then the structure of my religion can be rebuilt. Constantly rebuilt out of different materials. I'm not forced to say "Because this isn't true and that isn't true means there is no God." Rather, knowing that every estimation of God I have is just a perception and never a reality, I can change it with each experience I go through. If I lose faith in a personal God, I can move to an impersonal God.

When I was a child, I had one idea of God, and He was a scary man who watched over me. Jesus was a resurrected man whose words I could read, and through those words, I learned of love- a particular form of love. As I grew up, my fear of God shifted depending on how I perceived Him at the time. During severe bouts of OCD, I asked Him to strike me down if I was going to never be forgiven for blaspheming the Holy Spirit. I think I thought He just might. But, He didn't.
In my early twenties, I read Love, by Leo Buscaglia, and something in me changed. If God was Love and this was what Love was, wow! God was not to be feared. (I didn't give up on the Christian God because some ideas about Him were proven false- there are so many interpretations of biblical scriptures!) Then I met a lovely man who taught me that there was no hell- he taught me the history of words in the Bible, what Hades and Sheol meant, and how long these would last, and when God says He will save all men, He means it. This opened up a whole new world for me. I began to study the Hebrew meanings for English words, and the contex of those words. I was free of being bound to Monster God. He was only a shadow.

Without Hell, I began to see the truths in other religions. I studied Zen with a beloved friend, and found the world of non-judgment and non-duality. I saw things as they were. As I grew, my perception of God grew. I moved into Hinduism, and discovered a fascinating world of everything emanating from One Source. All of this led to a spiritual experience where I saw myself and a fly, and a tree, as all being God in form. And then Jesus became God and not just a man. As God, Jesus entered my life and I experienced Him as compassion. I did a Bible study which showed Jesus as being a funny man, a man of parties and humor, and this gave Him a new light in my eyes. I was safe with Him. That was how Jesus transformed as I did.

But, leading up to that experience, I had begun to feel out of place in church, it didn't feel right. I knew that they had only a perception of God, but it didn't help when they pretended their perception was fact. And after the experience, I felt as though I could accept their perception as their path and not mine. I was moved to tell people about my perceptions, because I didn't want to deceive others. As long as I went to their church and participated in their activities, I felt I was perpetuating a lie, yet I couldn't leave. There was still more to be learned. When I told a friend about my beliefs, she attacked me, saying Jesus would tell me he never knew me. I went through a period of pain and doubt, beginning to associate once again with their perception of God as an actual being. I was desperate to know that my path wasn't a misleading of the devil. I began to hate their God. Hate him as a monster and as something to detest and scorn. If I was going to hell, so be it. I didn't want to go to heaven and be with a cruel being such as he, nor join the literalist Christians. I fought against the doubts in my head about hell and I finally had a dream which confirmed my true beliefs. I said in that dream "I would rather die than believe in hell!" And I was free of hell, forever. Hell now is a game, a joke, I do not care if there is a hell. I will turn it into a paradise. And I know that hell is escapable, for I have been in the true hell-the perception that I am a damned, fallen, rotten being. That is hell.

I was a Christian, then a Christian Pantheist- because I still loved Christ and saw the truth in Christianity, especially liberal Christianity. But, then I met so many Christians denying my being a Christian, calling my beliefs delusions and nonsense, that I decided to drop the title. I had held it to show others that Christianity isn't what they proclaim it is. It is a religion of beauty and passion. It holds so much of the spirit- taken as a metaphor, not literal fact. If God demanded a blood sacrifice in order to forgive- no, not beauty, not truth, not love, not true forgiveness- actually, such an idea contradicts the Bible's message. "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." "Love keeps no record of wrongs." "God bound all men in disobedience so he could have mercy on them all." This is where the religion starts to fit with my beliefs- in that we couldn't experience Life without the opposites. Without something to disobey, we couldn't know mercy or forgiveness. They wouldn't be experiences. Then we can see the Garden of Eden as a game God played willingly with His children (or, expressions) He gave them a law, so that they might break it. The knowledge of Good and Evil, that was entrance into the world of opposites, the bursting forth into life- which God as the Infinite already knew, but which each Child needs to choose for themself- absolute bliss, with no experience of bliss, the Great Deep, the Void, or Expression. You must express to exist. Christianity has so much to offer the world, so much! But, many people see only the literalness and they leave it behind, or they take it in another form and go back to treating people like dirt.

Now, I am a Pantheist, and for me, God is still a person. I discarded the Christian version of God-but my perception of God just... changed. Although, sometimes I still see the Old God, the Cruel One, the Destroyer, and now I am tempted to retrace the Biblical metaphors, to experience this God for who He was perceived to be, and understand His place in this Cosmic Dance. All perceptions of God are expressions of some aspect of the Divine. As some religions show, the Divine Manifestation is both wonderful and terrible. Afterall, the Divine manifests as Good and Evil, Love and Hate, Birth and Death. This seems to be the story of the Biblical God. He directly points to God as Everything. If I can see Him as an expression of the Divine, perhaps His power as the Divine Itself will fall away, and He will not trouble me anymore, but I can live in harmony with the Shadow, in acceptance of Life Living. This is what I long for now.