Why I left Catholicism

Recently I have made the decision to leave the Church. I left Catholicism because it felt like it was choking the life out of me. It made me feel guilty and trapped, and the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. I couldn't help but notice the inconsistencies and the sheer ridiculousness of it all, like the idea that even if you were a perfectly good Catholic your whole life and had all the sacraments, if you went to confession on sunday, sinned on monday then died on tuesday - You would spend your entire enternity in hell.

Last year I developed post partum depression after a particularly difficuly birth, and for about 8 months I struggled, constantly tormented by the fear of dying and going to hell. I was aslo terrified of my son dying and going to hell as well because he wasn't/isn't baptised. The more I thought about it, the less sense everything made. I knew the faith I had clung onto for so long was slipping through my fingers, and I was desperately trying to trick myself into believing what I knew was false. I felt like I was in an abusive relationship with my own faith, the faith I converted to of my own will 4 years ago, gave up my friendship group for, and had once been so inspired by. It had brought me comfort like nothing else and I had to come to terms with the fact it was killing me inside. I was having dreams of demons talking backwards, my baby dying, I felt utterly controlled by fear. In christianity, this would be God testing me, pushing me, trying to break me to my limit to prove my loyalty to him.

A few of my closest friends are Wodenists, and their influence is one of the things that helped me to open my mind to other ways of thought. I began to study pagan belief, the worship of nature, life, and your ancestors. The more I read the more it made sense; The 'truth' to life - if there could possibly be one - would be centered around life/nature itself, not rejecting it. Is our Nature 'original sin', a punishment from eating the fruit of knowledge? Or are we delicately intertwined with the rest of nature, our insticts to be welcomed and harnessed, and knowledge to be expanded rather than shunned? ↩ Return Home