Letting in Lucifer

My Path to Spiritual Liberation

When I was new to adulthood, I co founded a Christian church. Only, at the time, and to my downfall, I did not think of it as a church. I had been attending weekly services with a small group whose doctrines I mostly agreed with, but whose highly authoritative, episcopal governance I could not abide. When scandals began to mount against our church’s leadership, people in our local congregation wanted out. Four men, ranging in age from 21-year-old me to a 70-year-old I’ll call Paul, sat down together one afternoon and found common ground on a new governance system we thought might suit the spiritual and social needs of ourselves and others in the congregation.

It was a simple model. There was to be no formal leadership. We felt that everyone in our group had something to contribute, and we would encourage one another to present topics for open discussions, bible studies, and sermons. Our weekly meetings would be bookended by singing hymns and offering opening and closing prayers to the Invisible Man in the Sky whose guidance was sure to direct our proceedings with peace and mutual enrichment. We did not worry that the anarchistic structure of our little group could present conflict because we truly believed the very absence of human authority was the ultimate display of a devout congregation that has completely put its faith in God. The only hierarchy we had amongst ourselves was so ingrained in our belief system that it went without saying: We adhered, of course, to the black-and-white patriarchal guideline of 1 Corinthians 14:34 which states, “let the women keep silent in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection, as also saith the law.” Women in our attendance would observe but not participate.

Looking back, it’s kind of funny what happens when biblical literalism clashes with our better nature. One way or another, nature always wins.

Once our little club was established and registered, people started trickling in. Each week, we had higher attendance than the week before. It wasn’t merely that people were curious about the cool new church in town. The church they’d come from was sinking fast in scandals and corruption, and these people were sincerely looking for a new church to call home. This was serious stuff to them, and they wanted my three co-founders and me to take the sanctity of what we were building more seriously. After all, they were entrusting us with the security of their souls! Problems inevitably arose. Many felt compelled to pay tithes to the church, and although we gladly took donations to cover the weekly cost of renting a nice big room above a rec centre, we were uncomfortable with running a surplus and would almost always refuse people’s money, suggesting that our congregation instead pay their tithes to charities or other church groups. This did not always sit well. Additionally, our leaderless model and our open concept service format was a little too hip for some, especially older folks, some of whom had previously held titles like “elder” or “deacon.” At one point, an older man made quite a scene, screaming blasphemy over the fact that we had arranged chairs in a banquet style so that people would have a table on which to rest their bibles and notebooks, and so their kids would have a nice surface for their colouring books and Legos. Rows of chairs, facing forward, he fervently insisted: This was the way to prove our piousness to God.

The church’s unorthodoxy was a hot topic. I continually brushed our congregant’s concerns aside as tensions mounted. Soon, unrest was so great, it could no longer be ignored, so a bunch of us met up at a congregant’s home one evening to talk about some of the problems. Within the walls of the rented room we called “church”, women obliged 1st Corinthians. Once we stepped outside the church, however, women no longer had to be silent, and they really let us have it.

That evening, I was absolutely drilled by my sister-in-law, at the time, about the severity of church structure. We simply had to link our congregation to a larger, international Christian group so that an authority could oversee our affairs, intervene, command us, and most prominently, take in tithes. She was red in the face, and others passionately agreed with her sentiments. I finally shared with the group something I had kept private since our inception. “The thing is,” I confessed, “I just don’t give a shit, and frankly, I don’t believe God does either.”

I remember the shock in that house after I said that. You could have cut the air with a knife. I elaborated that I had never felt required to attend church at all. My relationship with the Invisible Man in the Sky was a personal relationship, and while I enjoyed the community and the weekly fellowship, I was pretty sure my soul would be just fine without any of it. My intention with the church had always been to make services a little less boring, a little less scary, and a lot more empowering (just not for women). The fear that was causing us to fight, driving grown men to throw tantrums over arbitrariness like the damn seating arrangements was, in my mind, indicative that taking structure too seriously was a problematic approach, and I wanted no part.

My admission ultimately meant to my sister-in-law that I was a deceiver. I had led this “flock” away from its former church, away from God, and I was now just fattening sheep for slaughter. I don’t remember how he did it, but my father-in-law, at the time, stole proprietorship of the group and signed it over to an international organization. In no time flat, 70-year-old Paul defeatedly announced that, going forward, a paid minister would be calling all the shots, and the chairs would henceforth be arranged in perfect rows.

I was out, and my life path took a turn. Divorce soon followed, and I began to unravel the beliefs that had got me into such a mess. I wanted nothing to do with organized religion, and I wanted to question everything. I decided that if my faith was strong enough, true skepticism would only move me closer to God because, according to Isaiah 48:17, the Invisible Man in the Sky promised to teach me and lead me.

It didn’t take long at all to be overcome with doubt. I read Hitchens and Dawkins with an open mind, and the believer in me gave way to the agnostic who, when I reflect honestly, had been hiding away inside me all along.

A few years went by, and my doubt grew. One morning, I had an experience that had me fearing for my life, and after my panic subsided, I noticed that resurrection, an afterlife, even my standing with the Almighty had played no part whatsoever in the terror of the experience. I realized right then that I was an Atheist.

It was a scary thing to realize when faith had backdropped relationships with friends and family members for my entire life. I thought maybe I could keep my faithlessness to myself, and no one would ever know. But lying got uncomfortable.

At family dinners, I would occasionally be asked to say a prayer before a meal. Uncomfortably, I would force myself to thank the Invisible Man in the Sky for the food my grandmother had worked hard to prepare. My muscles tensed as I asked for a blessing on our meal and on our family. It felt worse than inauthentic. I was violating my truth, waging war inside my body in order to keep peace with those closest to me. I felt sick and often had a hard time eating or maintaining a smile at the table.

I was proud that I had let go of faith, but it was a pride I felt I had to keep to myself. 

Growing up, church had been everything. I was taught that God was always watching me and reading my mind. I had to keep my thoughts and actions pure if I didn’t want to be tortured in “The Great Resurrection.” I was taught that a messiah would end the world very soon, but we didn’t know the hour or the day, so I needed to be on my best behaviour at all times. If I couldn’t sit still in church as a young boy, the minister would look at me disapprovingly. If I favoured my school friends over my church friends, my parents would remind me to keep distance from “worldly” people. It was a terrifying way to experience childhood. Eventually, I was homeschooled, isolated from worldly influence. All I had was the church, and even though I was miserable and lonely and felt deeply that normal social experiences of childhood and adolescence were passing me by, I believed the isolation was for my own good.

Allowing myself to lean into doubt, having the nerve to let go completely and admit God was a figment of someone else’s imagination, had taken courage, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t bring myself to come out with it, let alone respectfully decline participating in a dinner ritual. What I didn’t realize was that I was not alone.

In her book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe, Kate Cohen points out that in the entire history of the United States, there has been only one member of congress who was openly Atheist. She makes a strong case that every single bit of social, moral, and even scientific progress in the last thousand years has had to bushwhack through religion in order to materialize, and even then, religion has still been a constant force attempting to undo all of our advancements. For this reason, Cohen argues it is imperative that Atheists make their presence known. “I just want to change the default setting of American culture and politics,” she writes, “from ‘In God We Trust’ to ‘secular until proven otherwise.’”

When I reflect on my own difficult path to enlightenment and consider the social pressure I’ve experienced to keep my truth private, I wonder how many closeted Atheists are out there. 2021 census results showed 60% of Canadians believe in God, yet only 15% were able to identify as Atheists. This leaves a whopping 25% of Canadians (~10 million people in one country alone) lost in varying degrees of agnosticism, and I think we need to ask, why? Having spent time in that not-really-sure headspace myself, I think I can offer some possible explanations. First though, let us take a step back and have a very quick look at what exactly the agnostic population is not really sure about.

Of course the Christian god is the object of just one form of theism, and certainly within Christianity, there are hosts of varying beliefs and doctrines. Broadly speaking though, entertaining the idea that an Abrahamic deity might exist gives legitimacy to some common absurdities:

• Creationism. Despite all the evidence and research, the agnostic believes it is possible that life on Earth did not evolve. Rather, without any evidence, the universe is imagined to have been created by a superior, infinitely powerful being who is wise enough to have given the tiger lightning-fast reflexes, yet dumb enough to have given the ram horns that eventually grow into its skull and kill it.

• Afterlife. Whether reincarnated as a chicken, resurrected after centuries of decomposition, or immediately whisked into some place the James Webb telescope has yet to locate called heaven, the agnostic believes it is possible that the lifeless corpses of animals are nothing more than heaps of lifeless organic matter; however, when a human dies, she actually, magically, stays alive.

• Prayer. Telepathic communication with someone who never communicates back is like filling your crush’s DM’s with love notes for years and never once getting a message back. Only you never even see a “read” receipt. And your crush doesn’t even have a profile. And you are in fact writing all your love notes in Microsoft Word. And your computer isn’t connected to the internet. But she’s real, alright, and she loves you.

• Immaculate conception. I recently watched Richard Dawkins interview Jordan Peterson. For half an hour, Dawkins asked Peterson to give him a yes or no answer on whether he honestly believed Jesus was born from a virgin. For half an hour, Jordan Peterson dodged the question until finally freezing up and admitting any answer he could give would make him look foolish.

• The goodness of God. This is where my own journey ultimately led me to Satanism, which I will get to shortly. This idea that God, who once saw humans getting a little too kinky for his taste, so he threw a tantrum and killed all of them and virtually every single animal in a flood, is a really great guy because once the killing was over, he promised the survivors he would never kill like that again. Of course, like any great guy, he broke that promise repeatedly, committing genocide after genocide, even killing thousands of Egyptian babies just to flex on a Pharaoh. He commands people to kill homosexuals, to own and beat slaves; he recommends that parents beat their children. The agnostic turns a blind eye to all of this, typically by suggesting that God turned over a new leaf some 2000 years ago. There is now a New Testament God who utterly oozes love out of his pores. And if you don’t accept this peaceful, loving, absolute snuggle of a deity as your saviour, he is going to torture you forever and ever, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. He is so compassionate, he recommends gouging out your eyes so you won’t be tempted to do anything that might set him off (Matthew 18:9).

These are just a few of the things agnostics are unsure about, but the list could easily go on. When we look at these assertions at face value, it is hard to understand why it is difficult for many to admit they are impossible. Enter Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal was a 17th century French philosopher who made a famous case that a person’s decision on whether or not to believe in God is the ultimate gamble because if you don’t believe in the absurdities listed above, and against all odds, you turn out to be wrong, your infinite punishment will surely make you regret your decision. Pascal’s argument is that the consequences of God’s “possible” existence, no matter how unlikely, far outweigh any finite inconveniences and discomforts a life of faith might impose on your life even if you were to believe and be wrong.

The social and political pressures I alluded to earlier are also major factors that can make it difficult to let go of belief.

The sense of community we get from a church or a common belief system is hard to come by in today’s fast-paced world. Many people who shirk their faith risk losing the security and support system of their religious community and sometimes even their families. They might feel judged or cast out or self-conscious, having severed a bond that previously connected them to people they care about. 

Politically, it is career suicide for a Western politician to admit he does not filter his worldview through the God lens. In 2022, Bloc MP, Martin Champoux motioned for the Canadian House of Commons to eliminate prayer from its proceedings to show respect for “the beliefs and non-beliefs of all parliamentarians and of the general public,” and to abide “the principle of the separation of church and state, the views and freedom of conscience while upholding secularism and religious neutrality of state.” Champoux’s common-sense, constitutionally-consistent motion was voted down 266 to 56 with Prime Minister Trudeau dismissively stating, “Canadians have other priorities.”

The problem with all of this is that God simply is not real, and pretending he might be out of fear is not how we progress as a society and certainly not how we grow as individuals.

In my journey, I found that I could not live inauthentically, and I soon stopped pretending. I didn’t go screaming “there is no God” in my grandmother’s face, but I declined offering or participating in prayer. When people gave glory to God, I would often correct them. When I rolled my truck, going 120 km/h and emerged with nothing more than a slightly stiff neck, I was told “someone was watching out for you.” “I wish he’d watched a little closer,” I said, “because I just totalled my truck. Should I thank God for inventing the side impact beams that saved my life while I’m at it, or should I be sending a letter to some German engineer?” Perhaps I’ve been a touch outspoken at times, but I would challenge anyone reading this to consider asking, why the hell shouldn’t we be?

God is thrust in our faces on a daily basis. We walk on eggshells among family members, friends, bosses, and co-workers, while they are free to spout their beliefs with no holds barred. We cannot enjoy a football broadcast without listening to some receiver explain how God guided the ball into their hands and pumped their legs into the endzone. Very conservative estimates suggest a third of all Americans experience religious trauma. This means at least 33% of Americans may be forced to fight through triggers at the very mention of religious dogma. I wonder then if we ought to thank God that there are organizations fighting against the imposition of religion.

When I first realized I was an Atheist, it bothered me how talk of God was so mainstream. It was everywhere, and in my aversion to it, I found myself pushing further than mere nonbelief. I had a big problem with faith, its normalization, and Western society’s dismissal of its psychological, sociological, and intergenerational harm.

One group standing up to religious imposition was the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) which had won an impressive number of cases against state-imposed religious practices and displays. In following the struggles and victories of this foundation, I soon learned about an exciting advocacy organization that FFRF often partnered with on its campaigns called The Satanic Temple (TST). This was a group that challenged publicly funded Christian initiatives like after-school bible studies, Christ-centred rehabilitation programs, and monuments to God on government properties by juxtaposing Satan-centred initiatives alongside these “harmless” religious exhibitions. The angle of TST’s advocacy has been that if Christianity is to be displayed in public forums under the constitutional protection of free speech, then religious pluralism can therefore be exercised to its fullest extent by also allowing displays of Satanism. The irony and the honesty of TST’s tactics appealed to me as I was learning about the organization, but my enthusiasm begged the question, what the hell was Satanism?

Satanism, it turned out, was the step beyond nonbelief I had been looking for. Satanists not only reject the legitimacy of God’s existence, they reject the narrative of his goodness. They notice that God lied to Eve when he told her that eating from the tree of knowledge would kill her. They don’t give God a pass for hardening Pharaoh's heart against his slaves so that God could plague the Egyptians and claim glory for the exodus of the Israelites. They celebrate Lucifer’s rejection of God’s oppressive authority, declaring “I will not serve!” In other words, Satanists are aware God is not real, but they are also so steadfast in their inherent morality and so objective in their observation of Christianity that even if God was real, they would refuse to serve him.

The history of Satanic practice dates back to, at least, the 1400’s, and it has always carried an air of rebellion. Early French feminists would invoke anti-Christian philosophies and rituals as they secretly performed abortions on raped women and concocted poisons to eliminate their abusers who were otherwise protected by the patriarchal tyranny of the church. Since Christian hierarchy justified their oppression, these women were openly “anti-Christ” and among the first to sympathize with Luciferian lore, how the one we call Satan protested God’s domination.

Satanic history is rich and inspiring, but I will fast forward to 1969 when Anton LaVey published the Satanic Bible. It was an angry book, but it was liberating. You couldn’t read it without wondering why our world was so afraid to challenge the Christian bible. It was a counter narrative to the goodness of God, reminding the reader that human nature was to be embraced, not shamed, since God, after all, wasn’t even real! The more I learned about Satanism, the more I was sold. I loved its modern activism, and I loved the way it fulfilled me on a personal level. Satan, although a fictional character, was calling out the belief system responsible for so much of my frustrations and trauma. He symbolized, not only my rejection of faith, but my liberation, my enlightenment, and most importantly, my empowerment. I learned through Satanism, the fact that there is no god, essentially makes me my own god. My life is in my own hands. I can take full credit for all of my accomplishments and take full responsibility for where I would like my life to go. All glory and all power is mine and mine alone. Looking back, I do wish I had realized these truths all along, but I have to say I am grateful for the journey and the perspective I picked up along the way.

I believe we should all be free to believe and practice whatever feels authentic to us, only if our beliefs and practices do no harm to others. This condition is where I have a difficult time reconciling Abrahamic religion. I have yet to see how belief in god can be truly harmless. It is the only reason women are denied the right to choose. It is the only reason Palestinian children are being shot in the chest at this very moment. Billions of children are currently living in fear that their bodies will cause them to burn in hell, and they feel that way only because they have been abused by theistic dogma. I wish I could have a to-each-their-own attitude about religion, but the harm is just too great and too common. I sincerely hate Abrahamic religion, and to be truthful, I would love for it to fuck all the way off.

This story has been my path from devoutly pious to intensely unfaithful, and perhaps, welcomingly damned. Before I conclude this post, I want to touch again on Pascal’s Wager. What Blaine Pascal missed was that finiteness asserts a gravity to our lives that would not be present if there was, in fact, an afterlife. We have one life. It begins when we are born, and it ends when our hearts give out or when we accidentally take an exceptional bonk to the head. To waste our lives in the fear of something that is truly impossible, we completely devalue our very existence.

We humans are smart enough to be capable of knowing Christian lore cannot possibly exist in reality, yet we are fearful enough to battle our own better sense. I suggest we dare to trust ourselves, and further, I advocate that we become vocal about our faithlessness and our rejection of God and the negative influence he has had on our world. For me, I found my voice and my truth in The Satanic Temple, but your path may take you elsewhere. Just know that you are not alone and that it is okay to be angry at the religious dominion you may have experienced in your life and witnessed in the world around you.

More and more psychological professionals are championing religious trauma, and there is a growing number of resources out there for those healing from the abuses of theistic oppression. If you are struggling, drop me a line on IG or in the comments below, and I will help link you to support in any way I can.