Leaving the Church to Find God
From Doctrine to Liberation: Redefining Spiritual Identity with Britney Winland
Growing up as a pastor's kid, Britney Winland has danced along the delicate edge where faith meets personal identity, often finding herself entangled in the expectations wrought by rigid religious doctrine. Her journey, mirrored by the narratives shared in this episode, weaves through the tapestry of spiritual discovery, challenging the boundaries of traditional worship and the courage it takes to step beyond them. Together, we unravel the threads of gender roles, the arts, and how my mother's audacious pursuit of her career despite ecclesial resistance shaped my perspective on divinity and self-expression.
Venturing further into the labyrinth of belief, we confront the specters of indoctrination and the quest for an unshackled connection with the sacred. From dissecting the cultural influences of shows like Ted Lasso to discussing the psychological aftermath of conditional acceptance within religious communities, our dialogue traverses the terrain of emotional intelligence, personal autonomy, and the rediscovery of our inner divinity. At the heart of this episode lies a narrative of liberation—a call to break free from the confines of oppressive doctrines and to cultivate a spirituality that honors our unique paths and purposes.
As the conversation unfolds, we cast light upon the systemic shadows within religious institutions, questioning the morality that allows for abuse and power misappropriation, while also celebrating the resilience of those who seek spirituality beyond the pulpit. The episode becomes a compass for navigating the complex relationship between established beliefs and the untamed wilderness of our spiritual selves. We invite you to join us on this enlightening voyage, as we redefine what it means to be spiritual in a world where the only constant is change.
If you would like to be a guest on this podcast or would like to support this work, visit www.leavingthechurchtofindgod.com where you can contact Melissa and or make a donation. Follow along my journey on IG at @authenticallymeli and find more in depth content on YouTube at Diary of an Authentic Life.
Growing up as a pastor's kid, Britney Winland has danced along the delicate edge where faith meets personal identity, often finding herself entangled in the expectations wrought by rigid religious doctrine. Her journey, mirrored by the narratives shared in this episode, weaves through the tapestry of spiritual discovery, challenging the boundaries of traditional worship and the courage it takes to step beyond them. Together, we unravel the threads of gender roles, the arts, and how my mother's audacious pursuit of her career despite ecclesial resistance shaped my perspective on divinity and self-expression.
Venturing further into the labyrinth of belief, we confront the specters of indoctrination and the quest for an unshackled connection with the sacred. From dissecting the cultural influences of shows like Ted Lasso to discussing the psychological aftermath of conditional acceptance within religious communities, our dialogue traverses the terrain of emotional intelligence, personal autonomy, and the rediscovery of our inner divinity. At the heart of this episode lies a narrative of liberation—a call to break free from the confines of oppressive doctrines and to cultivate a spirituality that honors our unique paths and purposes.
As the conversation unfolds, we cast light upon the systemic shadows within religious institutions, questioning the morality that allows for abuse and power misappropriation, while also celebrating the resilience of those who seek spirituality beyond the pulpit. The episode becomes a compass for navigating the complex relationship between established beliefs and the untamed wilderness of our spiritual selves. We invite you to join us on this enlightening voyage, as we redefine what it means to be spiritual in a world where the only constant is change.
If you would like to be a guest on this podcast or would like to support this work, visit www.leavingthechurchtofindgod.com where you can contact Melissa and or make a donation. Follow along my journey on IG at @authenticallymeli and find more in depth content on YouTube at Diary of an Authentic Life.
Aloha and welcome back to Leaving the Church to Find God, your safe space for exploring faith beyond traditional walls. I'm your host, melissa, and whether you grew up in the Evangelical Church, like I did, or any other system, seeking answers, you're in the right place. This podcast isn't about judgment or attacking institutions. It's about honest conversations, diverse spiritual paths and celebrating the unique journeys that we all take in search of meaning. We've all experienced indoctrination in some form, and here we explore how it shapes our understanding of ourselves and the divine. Each week, we'll dive into thought-provoking topics, share inspiring stories from guests and listeners like you, and offer tools and insights for navigating your own deconstruction journey.
Speaker 1:Remember, leaving the Church doesn't mean leaving your faith. It's about finding your own authentic connection to something greater. So buckle up, embrace the open dialogue and join me as we explore what it means to move beyond confines and discover the deeper personal connection to the divine that exists within us all. Just to get started, I know a lot about you, but not a whole. I mean I think that now that we're both on this journey of separating from those religious like constraints and all of that that there's more parts of us that are kind of coming to the surface. I know, even in our last conversation there were things that I didn't know about you that came up, which is crazy to me because I call you my sister, cousin.
Speaker 1:You're like my cousin, but also like a sister, yeah true, and so I think that that's probably true for a lot of us who grew up filtering what we show and what we say to people, that there was always this part of us that was hidden from each other. So I like to think that I know you, but I also understand that there's a lot of things that I don't know about you. And for those of who don't know you at all, let's just start at the beginning. So how did you get into the church?
Speaker 2:I was born into it. My dad was a United Pentecostal pastor in Rome, Georgia, and my grandfather who's your grandfather was also a pastor in Douglasville. My brother was a pastor, my stepdad was a pastor. My mother was a pastor's wife. I'm fully indoctrinated.
Speaker 1:That's what I was going to say First of all. What was like being a preacher's kid.
Speaker 2:I think it's. I don't even know how to answer that. Let me think about that. There were good things about it when it came to the church aspect of when I was at the church, because I was kind of like the center of attention, being the only girl and I sang, you know, and I did get some attention from that, I think, being the pastor's daughter. But then on the other side, I think you saw what was really the true essence of what the pastor is. You see that I always tell people like I have a different experience, because most people just go to church at one point. I grew up in it, so it's like I'm indoctrinated in it. So to come out of it you have to kind of re, just go back to the beginning and redo everything, to feel like you know what you believe and not what was given to you by somebody else. So I think a lot of it is. Basically I saw what really happened. I saw what went on in the pastor's home and my grandfather's home and you see more than the pulpit basically.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like it put any extra pressures on you to live in a certain way or be in a certain way, like you had to be an example? Or was that more put on your brothers and kind of skip past you, with you being the youngest?
Speaker 2:Well, I think honestly, I think, being a female as well, because it is a lot of, there is a lot of stuff in that religion that I think is very chauvinistic. So, I think, being a female, I wasn't as picked apart because they were expected to pastor the church. Eventually I was. It was a thing where like, oh, you're going to be a pastor's wife, you're going to be a pastor's wife, and I was always in my mind going, oh, absolutely not.
Speaker 1:That's not happening. I could never see you being a pastor's wife. Absolutely not. Uh-uh Any faith in our lives.
Speaker 2:No, I watched my mom. My mom is a great human being, she's a great teacher and a great lover of the word, but I saw that the constraints you know, and I even told her this the other day. I said I think the biggest thing in my childhood that influenced me the most was my dad, my mom wanting us to have a better life. She felt like we didn't have the things that we needed. And my dad? She wanted to go back to school, she wanted to be a nurse, and my dad was completely against it. He was like, no, you're not going, we can't afford that.
Speaker 2:So then she goes and gets a loan. And then it was still no, no, you can't, you're not doing that. All the way up until the day she started school, he was telling her the night before you're not going. And she got up that morning and went and I think that was the pinpoint moment in my childhood where I was like oh, oh, you don't have to do what they're telling you, you can do whatever you want, really and honestly. And on his deathbed because he died when I was 11, he ended up thanking her for doing that. That was a big deal to me. Is watching her, I think kind of stand up against.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember it was always an inspiration to me that your mom was an RN, was a nurse.
Speaker 1:She had a real and I didn't even realize it until I got older that she had a real job and a purpose outside of the home.
Speaker 1:But I always felt like that was recognizable in her, that independence, and I always really like my Aunt Deborah who Bernie is talking about is my favorite because she always was really true to herself in all the ways that she could be, considering that environment, and that's what I always saw with somebody who was always really true to herself. She was very intuitive and very loving and I always enjoyed my time with your mom because that was a time when I didn't feel like I was being criticized or being told to be anybody different, like I could just be with your mom and be loved and be comfortable, and I think that that it was a rare thing in the church environment. So the fact that she was able to be a preacher's wife for so long and still do her own thing and still maintain this part of her that is very intuitive amongst all the indoctrination, I think is a really powerful thing, and I know that there are some very powerful parts of her that you just can't snuff out, no matter how hard they try. Well being a woman.
Speaker 2:You just, you know it's that whole. It's in that movie my big fat, great wedding. The man is the head of the house. You know it was that whole head of the house mentality. The man makes all the decisions. You are subservient to the man. I think that's part of a lot of religions, especially part is part of some Christianity, as part of Islam. I mean it's, it's just, it comes along with the territory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, I feel like that's intentional. It was intentional in the way that it was made because women are so intuitive and so powerful, like the Egyptians, who are, like, the most sinful people according to the Bible, right, the Egyptians, you know, actually the women led the household and the women were considered the protectors and the providers, because we create life, like we are literally the portal between the unmanifested and the manifested, and they recognize that power in women. And so I believe that the church deemizing women and putting men as the head of the household is completely intentional, because women lead differently and women lead with their intuition and they lead with their heart, and you can't maintain this kind of structure for this long with women leading. It's just not going to happen. We're going to see that soon.
Speaker 1:I feel like women are coming back into their power. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but it is like in the evolution of humanity. I believe that women are coming back into their power. This work that we're doing here right now, in this moment, is a part of that. You know, this is a movement that's happening and that that is all intentional this umbrella of God and then the man, and then the woman, and then the children. For me that always just like made my skin crawl because that just doesn't, that just doesn't add up. You know what I mean. Especially not when all the men that we witness not all of them, but so many of them were behaving very badly in the Well, I'm going to, I'm going to quote Jesus.
Speaker 2:There is no Jew nor Gentile, no male nor female in the kingdom and they're really not going by that Right. And the laws let's be honest, the laws on the women are a lot different than the laws on the men. When you start getting into some of these real religious groups and their hardcore rules, the laws are about the women. You got the same thing going on over in Iran with the women standing up going. We don't want to wear this hijab and these deep religious movements. That's the way it is.
Speaker 2:Once you study religion like I've studied a lot of religions, not just Christianity. I wanted to look outside of Christianity and see what these other people believed and how they were different. What you study, that you realize you know there were Buddhists before there, but the Buddha was before Jesus. He was 500 years before Jesus. And you've got to me, once you really look at it hard, you've got the same principles. You've got him with three temptations. You've got him with the disciple, his own disciples that can almost go down to the character of Jesus's disciples.
Speaker 2:So what I said to people when they say, well, what religion are you? I say I don't believe in any religion that cuts out whole groups of people, because God doesn't love me any more than he loves an Iranian kid or a Chinese kid, or if we're all the same, you know, and maybe these stories are coming differently to them and I kind of look at it like as storytelling. And Joseph Campbell is one of my heroes. He wrote the hero's journey, which basically every movie is based on, but it was about the collection of stories over civilization and how they were the same in a lot of ways. One point I'll say is I told something I said to my mom the other day. I said my favorite story in the Bible is Job, I said, but I don't have to believe that job is real.
Speaker 2:And she's like no job is real and I'm like well, you can believe that. And I said I can believe what I want. I said but doesn't matter, all that matters is did you get the message? That's all that matter. And that's what I see about other religions they're getting the same lessons, they're just not in the same way, and really the only difference is whatever rules your group has come up with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, and I also like, from looking at the different religions, like with the book of Thomas and other religions, like I've noticed that in the text that they do present to people, there's always a part that's left out, and that part is always the part that tells us that it's in us, that the answers are in us, that we have all of it, that we are made of God like we are, we are the same, and that we don't have to look to something outside of ourselves for the answers. We don't have to go sit in a church and we don't have to listen to somebody else's idea of what God is, because we have it already inside of us and that's what the book of Thomas states. The same things as, like creating our own reality and how Jesus performed these miracles, and that it wasn't because Jesus was this blessed one, the only person with these powers. Jesus even said that, like we're no different, you can do this too. But all of that part is cut out, and in all of the religious texts, the parts that are cut out are the parts that bring us back to ourselves and tell us that we are the ones with the answers. So to me, like the whole point of that would be to keep people coming back right, because if people I even had this in the first episode we were having this conversation with Rich I have a feeling it's going to come up often because it's you know, the theme that it's all based on.
Speaker 1:So much of what we're taught is to keep us away from ourselves, because when we get back to ourselves, it's all there, all of that wisdom, all of that knowledge is already there. And the more we come back to ourselves and we tap into ourselves, the more we can access that knowledge. And I believe that the church has done that intentionally and has done that by teaching us everything about us that connects us to the divine is sinful. I can't ever forget that, like how we were taught that music was something from the devil and how Satan used music to tempt the angels to come with him and all of this. But music is one of the ways that we really express our divinity and connect with divinity, so of course, they're going to make that a sin.
Speaker 2:Well, they're still using music. By the way, Look at how they're using music. I mean, they're using it at the end of the sermon. They're using it for pathos. They're using it to bring the emotion in, to tell that last story, to get you down there. Yeah, they're still using the things that they're against. By the way, that's what kills me.
Speaker 1:And as a musician like I think it's amazing that you always held on to that and that you took that, because I know in the church that was a really big part of your life was the singing and being part of the music ministry. So I noticed and I want to hear about your experiences of this the people who were in the church that have musical talent, that have a desire to use that musical talent in their everyday life. It had to be for God. Like you couldn't just go express yourself musically if you were anywhere other than singing in a church, then it was sinful and that you were using your gift for the devil and like you couldn't really pursue a career in that unless it was based on Christian music. How do you feel like that affected you as a musician and how did you break free from that to be able to Do you music wherever you wanted to?
Speaker 2:Well, I got the bad reputation because I was in the church. There was somebody that already did music. So I mean, it doesn't matter where you're at, there's always somebody else doing it. Where you're at, I wasn't really getting what I wanted out of anything musically, but somebody, I would say, discovered me singing and put me in their band and I saw a totally different side.
Speaker 2:But I was talked about really bad. I mean, it was like in the church people I was just a whore, a harlot, and I was married with three kids, just making money on the weekends singing. It was totally innocent, nothing nefarious came from it. There was no DUIs, there was no affairs, there was nothing like that. But I was talked about really bad to the point of I remember a couple of years ago I posted something and one of the ex-members of the church went underneath it after all these people had commented and they were just like you're going to burn in hell. And I mean it was just this long drawn out attack because I was singing in a bar. It was like it was crazy. I had to delete the person. But that's the reaction that you get If you go outside of the church to do anything you're talked about.
Speaker 2:You're degraded in that community. It's just like a cult. It's the same thing happened I can't think kind of with Pawpaw when he left the organization that he was in. I got told the other day he got put on because he left. He got put on the shame list for them and his picture was put up on websites and stuff and I didn't even know that. I didn't know that either Just because he decided to leave and not follow their teachings anymore. So it doesn't matter who you are, you do something outside of it and you're just the worst person that ever lived. You're Satan yourself.
Speaker 1:It's like that's how it is. I get that because, in doing this work like even advertising the podcast and I've been writing this book.
Speaker 1:We talked about it for a couple of years now, in that I noticed, like I was promoting the podcast on Instagram and I was promoting the podcast on YouTube, but Facebook where I'm most connected to our family and to our previous church family or like the people that we grew up with I wasn't posting it on there, and that's one thing is like, when I realized that I'm being held back by something like that, that I'm gonna like rebel against it in a heartbeat because I know that that's the answer for me. So I was like, oh well, I posted right this second and I did, and it was so liberating and I didn't even realize how much I was resisting that moment until it happened and I realized, like that's why it's been taking me while I'll write this book, it takes huge breaks. There's also a lot of processing to do with it, because I'm literally unraveling the indoctrination in the book and that takes time. But there's most certainly been a lot of procrastination. Knowing that there was gonna be this backlash which I find hilarious because I have not been in the church in like 15 years I was still holding back on that and holding back on sharing this part of myself. I don't question this part of myself, like this is me, but I didn't realize that I was like living two lives, basically, and not showing all of myself online. So I've been doing that unabashedly and there's definitely been pushed back. I expected it. So it's really like rolls off of my back because I've been preparing myself for this for a long time.
Speaker 1:But there is that like loss of community, and for me, that's what having this conversation is so important, because people who are questioning, or people who have left the church and feel alone, or whatever their spiritual journey is. I wanna create a community for people Like you're welcome here. Your opinions are welcome here, as long as they're not oppressive. Oppressive is not welcome here. Everything else like this is a place for us to be where we have community, and community that's not based on us living by a specific standard that was set by someone else.
Speaker 2:Years ago. Years ago, the same things that were us in years ago are now our vices. This is the really thing that got me the most and what I told my mom. I said to everybody that wants to know like why I left. Here's some logic for you. Because Jesus is the walking logos, because they look at Jesus. You know Jesus is the ultimate. So Jesus is the walking logos. The logos is easy to see.
Speaker 2:If I was to go back into the religion that I was in, 40, 50 years, the same people that are in that religion now they would think we're going to hell. They would be like oh, you've got, you know, a phone that you guys access to porn and the internet at any time. You know there are a lot of the things that they're doing. They would go to hell. And I looked at mom. I said but God doesn't change, people change, god doesn't change.
Speaker 2:So how can you live by that principle that God doesn't change but you constantly change the rules to go with society? That's against logic. I mean you can't say I believe this one thing and then 30 years later be like well, let's just give up on that a little bit, but we'll still push this hardcore, like I even expect the ones that we don't expect to like the religion that we grow up in, it's probably going to be one of the last ones to allow gays in the church. You know the Catholics have already done it. There's a lot of other churches that have already done it, but I think that they they're probably going to be one of the last ones, but it'll happen, I guarantee you, because they'll have to move with the times and eventually it'll be like we accept everybody. They'll still have rules Because they'll lose business, otherwise it's like within the business.
Speaker 1:You know, you start seeing these shows on now, like Ted Lasso and Lou it like shows that are like bringing people back to consciousness. They don't want to produce that stuff, they don't want us to unbrainwash, but that's where the business is and they're always going to go with the businesses and that's how the church is. It's like, you know, they want to keep as tight a grip as possible but in order to keep people sitting on those pews, you have to let go of a little bit of the grip as people start to wake up and be like actually, I'm not going to accept that standard. They're like okay, well, that wasn't really that important. Here's the new standard and it's because it's a business.
Speaker 1:It's like with the pharmaceutical industry right, like you don't make money off of well people and that's how the church is. It's like you don't. You don't keep well people, people who are whole and peace and satisfied, fulfilled. You don't keep those people coming back and sitting on the pews. You know, keep a standard that's impossible to meet, keep a standard that they're always failing at so that they have to keep coming back.
Speaker 2:You know people have asked me too about healing lately and I'm going to give you an example of that. Like they'll say well, don't you believe in healing? And I want the certain kinds of healings I do believe in. But okay, I'll give it as a play. At my church it was a sin to smoke cigarettes. So let's say you were a cigarette smoker of 20 years and they said come down to the altar, god's going to heal you of smoking cigarettes. You know you could have thought that you were healed and got home and wanted a cigarette like two hours later. The problem I have with that is there's no suffering there. Jesus suffered on the cross. That is the sacrifice If you want to stop smoking.
Speaker 2:I've stopped smoking at 27. It's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do and my kids and this is what kept me not doing it was they wanted me to quit smoking. Every day when I come home my kids would be like did you smoke today? Did you smoke today? So I couldn't smoke. I told my mom. I said that's the one thing that keeps me from smoking. It's not that I think smoking's a sin, I said, and it wasn't even my health at the time that got me because I wasn't really having any health problems and it was relieving stress it was. I don't want to go through what I went through the last time. I don't want to have bad health, but I don't want to go through what I went through the last time, and that is part of suffering. Suffering creates meaning, so if you're miraculously healed of things, where's the meaning coming from?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:How are you not supposed to just go right back to it? What are we supposed to do when the craving comes back? You see what I'm saying Where's miraculously healed but we still have cravings or whatever. You've got to suffer. You've got to suffer and learn. Some of the logic behind that is not good. Like healing I do believe in, but there's people that have real issues that want to be healed, other than some habit that they've taken on. You see where I'm going with that that they need to overcome. Well, you need to overcome that habit to become a better person, and you have to suffer to get through that. You have to suffer to learn. Anything that's part of life is suffering, and so you can't get rid of the suffering. I mean, it's a part of who we are.
Speaker 1:I believe that it's what we came here for Not just suffering, but all of it. Like. I believe that we are extensions of God, like we are source energy. We were made of source energy. I believe that we're God expressing itself, we're God experiencing itself, and that we come into the human experience knowing and expecting to feel the entire range of human emotions, which includes pain and suffering, but also joy and all of those things.
Speaker 1:And I feel like that's one thing that the church uses to control people is like, if you're feeling bad, if you're sad, if you're suffering, it's because you're in sin and God's not pleased with you. And that has caused a separation of people from their own feelings. And we're supposed to have feelings when you're angry. Angry is amazing, because angry tells you what you don't want and you can use that as information. Our emotions are information, like when you are enraged about something. When you're raged about something, that is your inner self, telling you that you have a need that is not being met and you're pissed about it. All of these feelings are necessary in a part of our human experience and by demonizing suffering or these things that are considered bad, it's really just more like separating us from music, separating us from dancing. It's more of separating us from what makes us divine, from what connects us to the divine.
Speaker 2:I've never gotten the dancing thing. I mean you look at birds who sing and fly. I mean any animal has some kind of form of relaxation. There's actually birds that dance to mate and there's insects that do it. David danced before the Lord. They can't really with all his might, you know, we don't know what kind of dance and he could have been doing this?
Speaker 2:We don't know. I consider myself a Christian because I follow the parables of Jesus, but I wanna make a point that a lot of these churches do not point out. They're not read this the other. They've read it more than once in the Bible, where it says that Jesus never told anything other than a parable in front of the people. It said if the disciples ask him questions he would talk to them afterwards, but when he was in front of the people he only told stories because he knew that's what connected and they would get meaning out of the story. But I think now it's turned into a finger point. You know it's more of a finger point than it is here. This is my experience, or this is what happened here. This is what happened here. It's more of a I'm gonna point my finger at you.
Speaker 2:You're not doing good enough and you kinda, if you're going to church, you a lot of times you get this. I don't know. I never had this great feeling Like sometimes I have it at church. You know, if we were in the middle of something great and you had music going on, but you know it didn't stay. It was. It didn't stay when I left.
Speaker 2:There was times I would pray to be healed of something. I wasn't healed of it. You see where I'm going with that. Then I've had things in my life that I can't explain and they had nothing to do with church, right, right, where God. I knew God was a part of it, I knew God was in it and I could see him working. So I think a lot of it is that we take whatever situation you're born into, nobody can control that. You can't control your parents are. You can't control what religion you are. You can't control what morals are given. All you can do is deal with what you've got. It's taken me I would say I'm 44 to about 38, 39 to realize who I am, because I just am so caught up in doctor. Nation of this is who you are. Don't go past this abomination. I'm telling you go past the abomination because if you go past the abomination you're going to find something and it's not going to be what you thought it was. It's going to be knowledge.
Speaker 2:Do the blaspheming, blaspheming, blaspheming. You kind of go past that abomination, because everybody has a certain abomination set in their mind, depending on what religion you are, but you don't go past the abomination. You never learn about other people. I mean, I felt guilty when I first started studying other religions because of the indoctrination that I had oh this is bad, I shouldn't be studying this, I shouldn't be looking at this, you know. But you know it didn't make me want to become a Muslim. I'm still a Christian.
Speaker 2:I am heavily interested in Buddhism because I do see the similarities between the Buddha and Jesus and I do like both of their teachings. But to me, I think that's the image of God to them, buddha is their image of God, and I don't think that we're going to heaven anymore than they're not going to hell. They're going to heaven, a lot of them are going to heaven. There's a lot of good people outside of the church, and that's not pointed out and there's a lot of bad people inside the church. By the way, a lot, a lot, and there's a lot of, I would say, in the one that we grew up in. I don't want to get detailed about it, but there is a lot of sexual misconduct. There's a lot of child molestation.
Speaker 2:And if you go back, if you're a Pentecostal or church of God or whatever you do if you go back to the origins, research your religion, because God is in the logic, and the logic is not your feelings and it's not your parents' feelings, it is the facts. It's the facts. Only, it's not your character, it's not your dad's character, it's not your grandfather's, it's the facts. And the facts are when I went back to the beginning of mine, it was set up by a man who was arrested for sodomizing a 17-year-old boy.
Speaker 2:I had no idea, I had spent my whole life and then I went on the website. They got somebody else's name on it the same college that this guy started. And let's not even mention the fact that they weren't allowed to have a church with black people. I mean that was Right. If you go back to that stuff, they were segregated. I don't believe in that at all. Those are the facts. If God is in the facts, if I'm in my head making up something going, well, it's okay what they did and it's okay that this happened to my friend or it happened to me in the religion and it wasn't supposed to happen or whatever, they just dismiss it and they go on, I think.
Speaker 1:as far as the sexual misconduct, I feel like it's designed that way. I honestly feel like that's so much of what the church is built on. It's men wanting to be able to take advantage of girls and young boys. And there's a lot of blind obedience that's taught in the church Blind obedience to your parents, blind obedience to the pastor, blind obedience to the elders. You are obedient because they are the elders and that's what puts kids in these positions, to where they're being abused, sexually abused, abused in other ways by people in power, because they've been taught that the Christian thing to do, the right thing to do, is to respect these elders, to listen to what they say, to do what they say, and so people keep quiet about it.
Speaker 1:And there's so much shame around sexuality that, especially with young girls, like the boys too, because of all the shame around homosexuality, that they internalize it and they think that they're bad. They did something wrong. If they tell someone like it's sinful and it's shameful, so they keep it hidden. And then this cycle just continues to perpetuate in the church. But if you look at what it's built on, like in the Old Testament, their story after story after story, how God's instruction was to kill these people and then take the young girls and use them as your wives, you know, unless they're not virgins. If they're not virgins, you stone them to death. Like that's what we're basing our spiritual beliefs on.
Speaker 1:These stories were God, over and over and over again, directs people to go, commit genocide, to take people as slaves, to use young girls as their virgin brides. Like it's when that's what it's based on. You can't build something new on top of that and call it holy. You got to get down to the nitty gritty of it, and the nitty gritty of it is the sexualization of children. It's the oppression of women and it's the sexualization of children, and it's separating people from what makes us divine. It's separating us from our bodies by telling us that our flesh is sinful. The moment we're born into this flesh, we're sinful. We can't dance, even though dance is one of the quickest ways to connect to the divine. When you move your hips, you're literally connecting to your intuition.
Speaker 2:Well, you can dance in church. Yeah, you can dance in a different kind of way, but don't you move those hips, don't you?
Speaker 1:move those hips I have found like, literally when I want to get where I'm channeling and like things, just downloading things, I'll start dancing, especially to African music. There's something about that that just like stirs my soul.
Speaker 1:And I start dancing and moving my hips, and in the hips that's your sacred chakra, right, that's where the creativity comes from. You know, in the music you feel that divinity that we were talking about with the pathos in the church. In the music, you know, for so long I thought, oh, that was God moving. God's here, because when this happens I feel this amazing spirit. You know, I feel the same thing dancing in my living room to Rema and Selena Gomez singing calm down, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel you on that one.
Speaker 1:I love that. So it's like all these things that separate us from our divinity is what we're taught. The whole foundation is built on this, and someone was having a conversation with me on Facebook yesterday and it was amazing how quickly they glazed over the rape and slavery and genocide thing. Like, oh, but we've all made mistakes. And I'm like, but you're trying to build a whole spiritual foundation on this? Like, you can't do that. You got to scrap it and start fresh and you know they're Mormons.
Speaker 2:Right, this is what I tell everybody. Yeah, I. If you go back, there wasn't a lot of religions that got off the boat in America and if you look at it now, and basically you had Mormons and Catholics and the Mormons, I know there was 12 major figures that left the Mormons. Three of those ended up starting the assembly God the Baptist and the Pentecostal they the way. I remember being a kid and we would see Mormons and I would say, oh, mom, those are Pentecostals. And she would be like, no, no, no, they're Mormons. But now I know why, because we came off of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we still have the same and, by the way, these are the same ones that are still over there in Utah, with eight wives living on compounds. This still goes on, and I think one thing that the Pentecostals don't have anymore is the multiple wives. But we came off of that and it still shows. It still shows in the way they dress. I thought they were us so and I think another thing you got to look at too I said you know, you've got one religion in Iran, you've got one in China. I mean, you've got three different types of Buddhism, but you basically got Buddhism. I said you look over in America. We've been here the shortest amount of time and we have a 5000 religions. You go another 100, 200 years, you're going to have 7000 religions.
Speaker 1:And all of them, or hopefully, no religion at all.
Speaker 2:And basically religions. To me, is people not agreeing? No, well, we agree on this. The Mormons agreed on this, but then we broke off here because we didn't agree on this. So I'm going to start my own church. I'm going to start my own church and then it goes from there. It's just everybody with their different view on what their rules are, you know, and the whole point of God is to find God yourself. The Bible says study yourself approved. If you don't do it yourself and you're getting it from somebody else, you're not getting it Right.
Speaker 1:And it's going to be different for everybody, for every single person. Like we all came here with our own purpose and not a purpose. I don't believe a purpose that was given to us. I believe that we choose. I believe that our soul knows and that we choose our parents. We choose where we're born or to. We choose the situations that were born in in order to learn what we choose. We learn what we are meant to learn for our soul to evolve in each lifetime. So I don't believe I have this purpose that I have to fulfill or I'm disappointing God. I believe that my soul chose a purpose for coming into this lifetime and that's what I'm aligning myself with.
Speaker 2:I can bring us on the notes. That bothers me is the faith issue. When I told mama that's the first thing I discovered when I started studying on my own was faith in that church to me was defined as If somebody needs healing, you have faith, and if you don't have enough faith, they're not going to be healed. So let's say they're not healed. Then you're guilty because you didn't have enough faith for this person and that you know that's not real faith. Real faith is if they're not healed. I still believe that's real faith. And telling people that you know you're the result of your own, because you're not doing this or you're not doing that, you know that's because you're a bad person and this and that, no, god just may be wanting to teach you something. That's my view of it. You know you may be going through this for a reason. You may be going through this because of the law of attraction you put in. The law of attraction is in the Bible. It's you reap what you sow.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely. Well, that's what the gospel of Thomas talks about is the attraction and how that works too. But he goes into more instead of the punishment of you reap what you sow Like you can create your reality. You can create what you know.
Speaker 2:I believe that?
Speaker 1:Oh, I believe that and that's what I was getting into was like how you know what's what's right for me may not be what's right for someone else and two things can be true at the same time. Like that's emotional maturity is being able to allow multiple things to be true at the same time. One of my favorite podcasts we can do hard things. One of the things that we're talking about was like Glennon has been on this journey of, you know, healing from anorexia, and so her work right now is to not be so connected to her looks like her work is. She's not wearing makeup as often and she's not wearing so much about getting her hair done and she just stopped doing her Botox. No, Amanda.
Speaker 1:Amanda.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Her. Amanda, her sister, is an overworker. She doesn't treat herself ever and she never does her hair or her makeup or anything. So Amanda's work has been to like straighten her hair and to put on a little makeup, and that's what's bringing her closer to herself and improving her life, and Glennon is the complete opposite thing. They're both right, and that's the thing about somebody defining what your life is supposed to be and the rules that you're supposed to live by is everybody has their own. Somebody else can't define for me what my life is supposed to look like. I'm the only person with that information. I'm the only person with that information. If I invite someone else to come in, someone who has intuitive gifts, and I ask them to share in that information, then they can receive some of that information and share it to me. Maybe some things that I don't see myself, but my soul. I'm the one coded with all the information for who I'm supposed to be in this lifetime.
Speaker 2:Nobody else.
Speaker 1:So defaulting to that, I think, is it's detrimental to all humanity, because we all came here with the purpose that we chose that. We know that our soul is supposed to be living and so many people are not even getting to touch that because they're spending their whole life trying to earn something that's going to happen after they die. Oh, you got to experience it now. Right, this is all we have.
Speaker 2:This is what you should expect, yeah, well, God talks to us too individually and everybody like I heavy into the Enneagram, which is taken writing. I know that's what they use for movies. It's the most accurate. When it comes to personality, it's basically about your motivation. My me on the Enneagram is doubt, so I think that a lot of that was created. I think it happens to you as a child and I think a lot of it was created because you know everything that I wanted to do. I was told no, no, no, no, you can't do that. If it was fun, we weren't allowed to do it. That's funny. I didn't say anything. Yeah, it was a sin if it was fun.
Speaker 1:No you're to suffer, he will suffer and you will die.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and don't say anything, because women are allowed to speak in the church a long time. That went on A long time that went on. What happens is we get, it's just you get caught up in the rules. You get caught up in the rules and you're not good enough and you're not doing good enough when you're doing everything that you can do and it's never good enough. It's never good enough. And then you find out things like you know the pastor's having an affair or that kind of messes with you a lot. But I think the good thing that comes out of church is the storytelling At least you're getting.
Speaker 2:I will say that because I tried to look at everything. I think has a bad and a good, and I talked to my mom. She's like well, what do you think was good that came out of it? I said, well, I learned David in the lion's den, you know. I learned the story of Joe. I learned these things that have been passed on from generation to generation to generation. They're telling the same kind of stories in the Buddhist religion. They're saying the Greeks are telling the same themes. Well, a lot of people don't get this about writing. I know you do, but a lot of people don't understand plot and theme are different. Plot is just how you tell the story, it's just the players. The theme is what it means and it doesn't really matter how you're telling the story, it's did you get the message? Like I said earlier, did you get the thing? Did you get the message? Who cares who? The players were Right. Did I learn anything? Does my consciousness become more because of that? I said Joseph Campbell.
Speaker 2:He talks about a plant consciousness, an animal consciousness, a human consciousness, like the plants know to turn towards the sun and your body knows how to break down your food. Yeah, there's a consciousness there that it knows how to do that. I'm starting to think that anything with energy is part of God, because that is consciousness. God is energy.
Speaker 1:You know that's. The thing that eludes me is how there's this the church places. It puts it as this like you can have God if you do these things and I'm like but you are God, like you were born God Like I'm Melissa, I have this personality and I have, like this body and this mind and this life that I'm living right now, but at the essence of it, with, like, the thing that makes me live and breathe is God, and that's energy, that's the energy of what I believe is unconditional love. I mean, the Bible says it plain and clear to me. That's the. That's what I took from the Bible out of everything that was said God is love.
Speaker 1:And that's where my questioning came in as a child, because I took that seriously and I believe that and I believe the things that Jesus would say about loving each other and about not being judgy and not discriminating. And then I saw how the church was teaching and how it was happening. That was always where the disconnect was for me. But I'm like, but God is love, and they're like, but God is an angry God, and I'm like no, god is love, just going back to the child.
Speaker 2:Here's what's my biggest thing is when people would say this to me, because I would be like I would give the rules out to them why do you do this? Why do you do that? Well, I do it because the Bible says this. The Bible says that. They would say well, god, only God, doesn't care about the outside, he cares about the inside. I could never argue with that. Right, there's no argument there. Oh I would?
Speaker 1:I would break out the scripture and tell them I don't want to help them. They were cutting their hair and wearing pants.
Speaker 2:What was Jesus doing? Like I said, he was telling stories. He wasn't pointing his finger. How can you say that you're following Jesus and the teachings of Jesus but you still judge he wasn't doing that His disciples were murderers. His best friend, mary was a prostitute that he kept from getting stoned. You have these same types of people coming to that church and they're not really welcome. Right, you see where I'm going with that. If you were to walk into a church with a short skirt on and you're going to get stared down, you're going to get talked about. It's not going to be like we love you, come, come join us. Some churches may be like this, but most of them are not, and they may be like that the first service, but then the second or third they're going to come to you and be like you're going to need to cover up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's this there's this book called religion hurt me, and I was listening to an excerpt from it the other day and that's what they were talking about. It's just like an abusive relationship or narcissistic relationship. In the beginning the person's going to love, bomb you right, and it's so sweet and wonderful and God loves you and we want you in this community, and it's like all this yummy loveliness. And then, once they got the person in there, then it's like, okay, now you have to do this and this and this and this, or you're not accepted, and at that point you're already in there and you just keep striving to reach back to this point, to where you can earn that love back, and that's not possible because the target's always moving. And then, once they're in it and their souls in it, and they love it and they believe it, then they start seeing the realities and I think that that tortures a lot of people. I think it causes a lot of addiction, a lot of people and aliving themselves because they get this, this conflict. They felt all this love and this beauty and everything. They can't get it back and so all they feel is failure and that life is impossible and it's hopeless, and so they're either numbing out or they give up altogether.
Speaker 1:In the church there's only two choices, like we're taught either you're living for God or you're living in sin. True, that's it. So I think so many of us have been indoctrinated into this idea that either you're living for God or you're living in sin. Well, they get into the church and after a while it doesn't make sense anymore and they can't reconcile it. Like you said, you can't do anything fun. All the fun stuff is a sin. So, of course, as humans, we're going to eventually choose the fun, the joy, because we're designed to live in joy.
Speaker 1:But we don't know that. We believe that we're sinning and that we're living against God. So the only way to live in a life that feels an alignment is to live in sin. So you never get to enjoy that life. It's spit and guilt and shame, ostracization from your community, from your family, from whatever else. So there's one or the other. You're either living for God or living in sin, and that's something that, for me, when I moved to Hawaii, I realized wait, these people are happy, they're living their lives, they're doing the things they're like, connecting with their kids, and these families are close and loving and they've never been to a church in their life. Like these people drink alcohol and these people use cannabis and they're wonderful and they have abundant lives where they're blessed, like they have good jobs and houses and their families are happy.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, there's nothing in the Bible against drinking alcohol. It's about being drunk.
Speaker 1:They take that to a whole other level. By the way, they take that to a whole other level.
Speaker 2:But I agree Absolutely. I've met families. Here's what's interesting to me. I have a great family. I have a joint family and my husband is a wonderful, wonderful person. He's very loving, very giving and our family dynamic is great. It's not perfect, I mean there are times when we have issues, but our family dynamic is great because we're kind to one another, the way we treat each other. But you go into other families and sometimes you get exposed to other families.
Speaker 2:Me and my kids were talking about this not too long ago. You don't realize how messed up some of these families are and it's just based on the parent. I think a lot of it and this has to do with church too, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that parents push their agenda on their children, whether it's religion or. But that God didn't to me. God didn't mean that for us, for you, to push yourself on someone else. They're supposed to find their own way. They're supposed to find their own way of being, their own way of living and their own purpose. I believe in purpose. I don't necessarily know that you have some set purpose when you're born. I don't think you can control any of the situations that you're born into, but I do believe that you have a purpose and nobody else can tell you what that is but yourself. Your mom can't tell you, dad can't tell you, your pastor's not going to tell you. You're going to have to find that. What do you enjoy doing? Follow your bliss.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Follow your bliss.
Speaker 1:That's what God meant for you to do.
Speaker 2:What did you? What were you born? And you were just like. I'm naturally good at this. Everybody's got something, everybody's got some kind of gift and whatever you're good at, follow that. That's where you're supposed to be. Whatever you love doing, follow that because God is in that. I don't think you're going to find God outside of yourself. You're going to find him inside yourself and he is inside of you. Like you were saying, I believe the whole message of Jesus was like our own grandfather, before he died, had switched and started preaching that the second coming was him inside of you. And that's that's.
Speaker 2:That's Buddhism. I mean, that's straight up Buddhism. I mean people can say what they want, but you go and you look at it, and that's Buddhism. They believe that Buddha consciousness is inside of you and you know, if you lead a decent, good life, that that it will benefit you. It shouldn't be having to. It shouldn't have to be somebody telling you don't steal, don't lie. You know, don't do bad to people. You should do that on your own because you know, ironically, the law of attraction is going to come back at you anyway. Like I, really I believe in the law of attraction 100%.
Speaker 1:I really believe that. So, whatever you put out, you're going to get out there and it's going to come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And, just like you were saying earlier, like there's a good and bad to everything, like I call it, the light in the shadow. It's also referred to as the yin and the yang or the end in the yang. Everything does have a shadow and it's always for me like the answers are in the shadows, like the places where we're afraid to look, the places where we're told not to look, the places that seem so scary. As soon as you shine a light on them, they're not scary anymore and you're going to find so many answers there.
Speaker 2:Follow the fear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, face your fear, Whatever your fear is that's what I meant by the abomination.
Speaker 2:Whatever is in your mind that you think, oh, I can't go past it. So, whatever somebody's told you that you have questions about, go look it up, do some research, go find out. You know, look at those verses that you're following and go read them in Hebrew and translate, because a lot of those verses are not going to come out the way the King James version. There's a reason the King James version sounds like Shakespeare. He was alive when they made that in England. He was alive. He contributed to that.
Speaker 2:A lot of times people are reading the Bible in terms of prose instead of poetry. It's not prose, it's poetry, it's metaphoric. It's not supposed to take me, taken literally Right. It's supposed to be storytelling. It's supposed to be imagination, some of it. That's why I said you know, I can believe that Job wasn't real. Mom can believe that he was real. That's not the point. The point is, I got the message. You should have faith. I think they get lost in the rules and then they have to follow every single thing and if they turn back, then they've ruined 10 years of their life or 20 years of their life, or they've done their kids wrong, or Papa was grappling with that when he died. You know, there's things that he there was, things he was proud of and there's things that he wasn't proud of, and I think that's everybody. Everybody's going to have that when they die. There's going to be things you're proud of and things you're not proud of. But you should find out for yourself.
Speaker 1:To come back to ourselves. That's the that's been the challenge. You know I've had to do some deep, deep trauma therapy and I have been deconstructing, which is the process that we're going through of like deconstructing the indoctrination. It wasn't until I really got into deep, like trauma work therapy, that I realized because even though I had deconstructed the doctrine, I had not deconstructed the indoctrination, because our brain, especially for those of us who were born in it, our brains are wired in that crime and punishment trope, Like everything I do. I even found myself like I've talked about this before, but like going into the new age world.
Speaker 1:You know there was a lot there that I found and it's still fine, useful, but I was still in this mindset of crime and punishment Okay, If I'm not in alignment, then bad things are going to happen. Or if I'm doing law of attraction wrong, then bad things are going to happen. And there's a set of rules that I have to follow. And I really didn't find peace in my spirituality until I left all of it behind and got in touch with myself. And what I feel like so hard about that for people not only being indoctrinated, but is that the church does everything it can to separate us from ourselves, from the God, and that's from that wisdom that we have and finding ways to get back to that is how these things open up.
Speaker 2:There's a big comeback right now with the rapture that's like, especially here over here in the Bible belt. I mean, I keep hearing from everybody A lot every week. It's like hardcore rapture, hardcore rapture, preaching, and I was like, you know, I don't get that, because people need to know how to fix the relationship with their son, their daughter, their wife. You know, that's what they need to hear right now, not God's going to come out of the sky and through a cloud on a horse. You know, if you read the Bible good, you realize that he refers to clouds as people as well, not just a cloud. And what is a cloud? A cloud is a covering, that's your body. To me, I'm reading that as a metaphor, not as prose, and I think they take it too little. Here's the one thing that I have that nobody's been able to answer for me.
Speaker 2:Okay, I've read Revelation about five times. There I think it's the chapter before the last chapter there's a list of things that he puts. He talks about the 12 tribes and then he talks about the name of each one and how they'll have this symbol or that symbol. Well, the symbols are the birthstones. I started looking up the symbols and they're all the birthstones of the 12 different personalities. That's Hinduism that came out of that. You don't have those words. I mean there's several different words for awkward Marine. You know there's six different words they have for that. But you don't have that set of beliefs without them and I Nobody's been able to answer that that hardcore believes in dark religion outside the, you know, just Christianity. Nobody else is going to heaven. They haven't been able to answer that. How come you got Hinduism in your Bible then?
Speaker 1:right.
Speaker 1:And there's a straw about with Buddha, with Buddhism and Christianity, like, or in those teachings of Christ, like it's the same in Hinduism. They have the same teachings, they have the same. You know, leader, that goes into the desert for for 40 days and goes on a fast and comes back with this understanding? That's a recurring theme, is Outside of Christianity, is a recurring theme. Right, and I use baptism, like literally, if I'm ruminating or something is like and I can't get it out of my crawl, I go to the river and I dunk myself and I release it and I say I'm giving this to you river, wash it through me, wash it through me, you know, and I do, and I'll duck myself three times. It's actually an indigenous practice for, like native, a lot of Native American tribes, is like dunk yourself in the river and let the water wash you clean. There's so many spiritual practices that use water to cleanse and they're in every movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you read the hero's journey, you learn that that's part of a movie. When I give you, the best heroes journey to me is Matrix, when he comes out at gook and he wakes up and he's in the matrix and he's in the good. That's the baptism. There's gonna be snake symbolism in every movie. There's gonna be the number three in every movie. I mean, that is, that is part.
Speaker 2:And and Joseph Campbell was just a man who went around to the different countries and studied religions and studied true, true storytelling and and he goes back to what you said, to where the women were at one time the top of the pyramid. Then the Neanderthals came in and they started killing animals and we had to build fences to keep them out. Then you couldn't keep them out anymore. When we, when we became a Neanderthal society, when we killed to eat animals to eat, that's when they kind of put the woman in her place. They felt like they needed it. That's you can go read that throughout history. There's a reason it's called Mother Earth, because she births a human and and the earth is birthing us. So I agree with you there. I think a lot of, a lot of it has been pushed against women and Again and children.
Speaker 1:You know, if you indoctrate children at a young age, it's gonna affect them for 30 years, 40 years, forever, forever, if they don't find their way out of it yeah, you know how many people do we know that grew up in the church, that they don't want to be in the church, but they're suffering, they're depressed, they're Numbing out in one way or the other. They can't just find their joy or find their happiness because everything they do they feel like they're disappointing God.
Speaker 2:Everybody's doing something, by the way. Yeah, let me just make that clear. If you're not smoking, we drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes. If you're not doing that, you may be a porn addict. You may be a food addict, right, I mean to me you know they harp. Or you maybe greedy, they harp so much in a lot of these religions. I've seen 500 pound men get up in the in the Pulpit and say you're going to hell for spoken cigarettes. Really, the number one killer in America is not cigarettes, it's heart disease. And it's not from cigarettes, it's from eating. So, um, how is it okay for you to say that to me? When you weigh 500 pounds, that's called gluttony. The thing I think you overdo it can can become bad. It doesn't matter what it is. You overdo alcohol, it can become bad you know anything?
Speaker 1:water and die.
Speaker 2:There's a fine line to between you know, drinking a glass of wine and then just being a belligerent drunk as well. Some people can't handle wine, some people can't, but life is a balance. It's a balance man, you got a balance things. And and I feel like the church comes against that because they say, oh, if it got. They say oh, they use that scripture about he'll spew you out if you're loop form.
Speaker 2:I don't think that has anything to do with the rules. I think that has to do with you know, your belief system, your faith system. You know, because I told my mom the other day, if I was to get one thing down to the Bible, if I would say and outside of love, I think love is a big one, but one thing, it's faith. I mean, they really attribute righteousness to faith and all faith is is believing in something bigger than you. And here, here, here's another way of putting it. Everything that happens, you know you don't have control over it. We don't have control over what happens in other countries or wars that are going on. These are effects of our societies. That that's just an effect. You know. The ants don't get along either. They fight too.
Speaker 2:So I mean I, I think that's completely normal, that you know we're gonna have different religions in different ways of telling stories. But think the thing that's miraculous to me is that God comes through every time. You see what I mean. You might get stuck in the matrix of it If you don't, if you can't pull yourself out and you don't start doing your own research. But I think the storytelling is big and, like I think I've told you this, I believe if you look at the facts and you look at the logic, the prophets are the writers. There are the people who Withstood the test of time, the arts that have stayed. You know Socrates said the smartest man is the man that says I don't know. Yeah, see where I'm going with that. I don't know because? Then he can learn, because if he decides he knows he's not learning anymore.
Speaker 1:There's not learning from there, and when we stop learning, we stop growing, and when we stop growing, we're dying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, period, and that is you know I, we were talking about this in my last interview. It's that, this trying to define something that is infinite God. I feel that God is always changing because God is energy and it's always expanding, it's always multiplying. I Feel like the principles of God do not change, like God is love, like these the law of attraction, these laws are laws, right, they don't change, but I believe that God is always expanding. God is infinite. Like that is even biblical. Like God is infinite, there is no beginning, there is no end. So how can we define something that doesn't have a beginning and end?
Speaker 2:You can't. And what if you're betting on a heaven that that don't even exist, like the heaven that you may think exists doesn't exist? You know that there's contradiction all through that. You know they believe that God's gonna come out through the sky on a horse. So my dad says, well, I know there's animals in heaven. I'm like why he goes? Because I just heard that God was gonna come out of the cloud on a horse. I love the deeper you get into it, like learning things for yourself or the further you go back in religion and the further you look things up, the more you're gonna know, the the more you're gonna see through things. That's the problem is, people don't see through things until something happens, like one of these pastors gets busted.
Speaker 1:You should be able to Love God and have self-esteem Because he made you that way but the church squashes our self-esteem by completely telling us, over and over again, how unworthy we are and that we were born unworthy and we have to spend our whole life proving our worthiness and trying to be as perfect as Christ. You know, again, it's a moving target. It's an impossible goal, which is what keeps you going back to it, right? Yeah, well, one of our time. On the law of attraction, we were talking earlier about the only two choices, like scenario, and I think that there's a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy in that too. Like people leave the church believing that they're gonna be punished for leaving the church, and through law of attraction, they create disaster after disaster after disaster, disaster, just affirming that they're being punished from not being in the church. But that is not God punishing them is a self-fulfilling prophecy from the belief that they are gonna be punished.
Speaker 2:How they treat other people. You know I'm saying how they treat other people. If I go eat with you and you say you're a Christian and you talk to the waitress like she's a dog, I don't believe you because you don't know how to treat people. And you know you don't have emotional intelligence and you know you watch people. They'll show you who they are every time. I mean, you don't have to watch them that long. Pay attention to what they're saying and what they're doing. They will show who they are Every single time. Believe them. Yeah, I believe them now. You're gonna believe them later on. Right, and you are who you hang out with, a hundred percent. I mean, that's just. That's just the way it flows.
Speaker 2:You hang out with the people that you identify with right so I Not totally like when people ask me, I say or what religion in my ass? I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. And I know that sounds like the cliche answer. Yeah, but it's true, I'm not religious, I am spiritual because, if I look at the logic of it, everybody's got their own set of rules. Who thinks that your set of rules is right? You know, the wisest man to me is the one who knows, who says they don't know anything because you don't really know that much. You don't even know where we came from, right.
Speaker 1:We've got a hope to be left wrong from one day to the next and we don't want to know everything. Now, what's the point? Like this life is an adventure, it's an unfolding, it's like discovery and learning. Like I love the spiritual journey, I love that I don't know everything, because that just gives me so much space to learn, to explore, to grow, to find, to discover. You know, like if I already knew everything, then what? Like I love learning, I love expanding, I love these kinds of conversations. I love that we believe a lot of the same things and we believe different things and that we can have a conversation and accept, without having to prove it at each other right or wrong, that we can just accept that's your belief and that's working for you, and that's amazing and this is my belief and this is working for me and I'm not telling you you're wrong, like I did.
Speaker 2:You know there's not a lot that we disagree on, but the things that maybe we do. I don't think that you're wrong because you believe that I think everybody has their own way of finding God in their own and interpreting it God in their own way, right?
Speaker 1:interpreting, interpreting through our own context, right like everything, even if you're talking to a psychic or intuitive or you know Someone who's channeling the words that are going to be used or the words that they have in their vocabulary, the examples. It's just like with the Bible being interpreted it's being interpreted based on the context that the people who interpreted it had, and they took a lot out by the way a lot, a lot of the good stuff, unfortunately, yeah, which is again, it's like I don't.
Speaker 1:You know. One thing I do express and will continue to express about this podcast and about this work is that I don't go Head to head on the Bible, for one COVID erase a ton of my memory or two I don't find it relevant. It's not a relevant text to me anymore. The minute I opened it up and saw God was ordering people to kill these people and those people, I was like this is no longer relevant to me. I've held on to the parts of it that Feel right to me.
Speaker 1:When I'm, when I'm worried about money, I remember that the birds wake up every morning Without wondering, without wondering where their food is going to come from. The flowers, you know, open up and face the sun. They're not wondering who's going to see them or what's going to happen next. I remember those things. I remember that God is love. I remember that you treat people how you want to be treated. All of these principles that I feel enrich my life. Faith and Love and expression. Those are the things that I've kept from the Bible. I don't need to go head to head on scripture because that's irrelevant to me, but I love to talk to people who do have a passion for that and breaking down those scriptures and breaking down that stuff because it's needed. Appreciate people who do this research, who you know are looking into different texts and Not just scrapping all of it all together and throwing out the baby with a bathwater, but that you're able to look at different spiritual practices, different spiritual text.
Speaker 2:Well, don't throw the baby out, just pull the plug. I Think that the Bible and I said this to my husband the other day you have to look at as a collection of different people. I think that's the biggest problem, as we look at the Bible as one big text and everything is. Everything says what it's supposed to say and you're supposed to go exactly how it says. Well, there was different disciples, on purpose. I mean, there's a reason what Jesus didn't have one disciple. You know you've got 12 different counts, or I don't know how many different counts of of Jesus. You don't have the same account Over and over and over again. I mean, you've got two Greeks in there and the both the Greeks called Mary a virgin birth. Well, they're the only two that did it. If you go back, every Greek mythology comes from a virgin birth. The other disciples didn't say that right the Greeks did.
Speaker 2:So you have to take in an account things like that, where these are different people at a different time, and I can read it and take from it what they had to say, but honestly it's there's a lot of contradiction. There's a, you know. There's Paul calling out Peter. Paul calls out Peter in the Bible two times for for sitting with the sitting with the Jews and Dismissing the Gentiles. There's a reason why that's there. Paul wanted to make it clear I'm calling out Peter.
Speaker 2:So there's contradictions and you have to take the Bible as as written by many, many, many people, many people, and and take it like it it was meant to be. I think, for you, I think what for like a thousand years, was only five books. So and I said this to some of my friends the other day I said, if you know you want to believe the, what you want to believe, christianity or the, the religion that you're in, go back to the first five books, because that's all they had for a thousand years. I mean, if God don't change, like the Bible says, and that's what you believe, then the New Testament didn't come in in hand, for way down the line, you know, and it was way down the line and it changes everything.
Speaker 2:That's part of the original Torah. It changes it all. It's a new doctrine. That's why you got Christianity and Judaism Right and you know the Muslims believe in Jesus. They still believe Jesus is coming out of the sky. They believe the same thing. So I mean they believe he was a prophet, just like Muhammad, and they believe he's the one coming back. So I mean there's aspects of every religion in in that. You see it in Judaism, you see it in in the Islam religion and you know the Jews didn't even know about the Chinese.
Speaker 2:That no idea Chinese even existed. So they can't really prove whose civilization came first. They think they both came up at the same time. So you're, a lot of people are going off of facts that aren't true. Yeah, stuff they can't prove, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:Well, when you said that, that was like, what intuitively came to me was like for anybody who's listening to this and You're reading the Bible, or you're sitting in church and or you're sitting in a meditation group and someone is telling you something that doesn't feel right for it, there's any part of you that questions it. Hold on to that. Take it outside of that room and go find out why. Look into it. Don't blindly believe anyone, and anyone who tells you to blindly believe them does not have your best interest at heart. True.
Speaker 1:Period most time they're manipulating you Absolutely absolutely, and you know we talked about I talked about this with rich rostin. It's like when you know I'm going through hard things or something, I know that there are certain people that I can't tell it about. Tell about it because they're I don't know who hard things. They think I deserve to go through hard things because I'm living in sin, you know. So I've had to learn that, like these people don't have my best interest at heart, they have the interest of this collective belief at heart. And Holding on to this collective belief and not letting anyone, letting anyone break that open, that's where the interest, because if they truly cared About my best interest, they would see how I thrive and where I thrive, and that it's not in the church.
Speaker 1:They would care about what your feelings were, yeah, and not just like stop believing that you have to listen to me, stop believing that you have to listen to me. That's not love, that's control, that's coercion, and I'm obsessed that we're doing it out of love. Yeah, like I remember Feeling like, oh well, if I, if, whatever I have to do, if I can get them into church, then that's the right thing. Yeah, we're coercing people with fear of going to hell, coercing people with fear of living a miserable life, like even if you believe, like that's. That's the thing that I think hurts the most is to see really good people with really good hearts that have bought into this and that are they're doing this work out of love.
Speaker 2:There are some, yeah, a lot of them. Yeah, I know a lot of Christians that that I think are good people. I know the opposite as well. I know people that are very nefarious, that claim to be Christians, and that exists inside and outside of the church.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I exist everywhere. Absolutely it does, and so does I think so does child abuse. But but when your religion is set up on an abuser, it's not a shock, right, you know, to see other people around you abused, or if you've been abused, it's not a shock because you realize, oh, this is the foundation of, of what this was built on. I'm not shocked that it still, you know, exists somewhere in the end, in in the indoctrination.
Speaker 1:The collective energy, right, yeah, the collective energy of this church is based on that energy of abuse. But like that's, that's no matter what the words are the collective energy that is built up, that is being like perpetuated, yeah, is an energy of abuse and control.
Speaker 2:There is a lot of abuse and there is a lot of control. I agree there there is a lot of abuse and there is a lot of control. And that and then and that's I Mean Scientology, has it, you know, any kind of, yeah, religious movement that I think ever all of them have. I think they've taken down Hillsong lately, you know, they've taken down the pastor of Hillsong recently.
Speaker 2:If you watch 60 minutes and the assembly of God, the guy that ran it for 15 years, they've had boys come out claiming that he had molested them and they found out they hid it and things like that. So I think God's like, I believe in God and I believe that he's kind of he works through irony, and I believe that that's happening for a reason. These, these, these churches are being exposed, started with the Catholic Church, which, by the way, is one of the biggest religions in the world. So you know they were exposed what 20 years ago? For what was going on in their churches. So I think some of them are just now being exposed.
Speaker 1:One of my upcoming guests was the Director of Catholic Charities for 20 years. So, I'm gonna have some really good juicy. You see, I have a feeling it's gonna be a two-part. It's gonna be a two-part episode.
Speaker 2:I want to see that. I really do, because Catholics really I feel like that's Peter's religion. He was the first pope and he was the one mix in Christianity and Judaism. No, like I said, paul called him out on it and I think that the Catholic religion is a mixture that I can literally looked at the religions and go, oh, that's Paul's, that's Peter's, you know, they're following Peter, they're Paul and Paul. I mean the Pentecostal religion is based on acts. I mean they're all literally. That was a movement that came out of Interpreting acts in a new way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was thinking about that the other day, and the whole thing is like repent, be baptized in the name of Jesus, you know, for the remission of your sins, and then you shall receive the Holy Ghost, whatever. But I was thinking about that the other day and I'm like it's so funny that all of Christianity is supposed to be based on the teachings of Jesus but he never said go get baptized and use my name. You got to say my name.
Speaker 2:He has a lot of names Yahweh, god, jesus. I mean, there's a Jehovah. That's what I told mom. I was like people are so stuck on this name thing. Allah. In church you're singing God, you're singing Yahweh, You're singing Jehovah, you're singing all these other things besides Jesus. What does it matter?
Speaker 1:You know, we name things as humans when we Connect back into the inside, we connect back into our divinity. It recognizes all the divinity. Everything that's alive is made of God and when we get in touch with that God that's inside of us, we hear it, we feel it, we see God in everything. I walk down the street I could be having a day that other people would be considering the worst day ever and I'm like on cloud nine, cuz that little butterfly over there is doing the cutest little thing. And look at how that leaf curl. That's so interesting, how that leaf probe when it grew out like that and like this is where I live now. I'm living with God. When I'm walking down the street, I'm in church. I'm having a church, you know. So that's.
Speaker 1:I think you get that when you sing. You get that when you sing. You're in that divine connection and it's channel, channeling through you. People hear that, people see that. It is a Magnetic. You know people love that. You can get people up and get people excited Because you're connecting with your divinity in that way. So you know, no matter what you believe, no matter, you know Any of that like it's still in you and you can find a way to connect.
Speaker 2:If you're, it doesn't matter. I've had discussions with my kids about this, because my son was all-star two years in a row for football in the. In the state that if you're an athlete or an entertainer or a musician or an actress or whatever kind of art you're in, there's a place that you have to go inside yourself in order To be able to really put on a good performance, and it's a place of peace. If you go to either side, you create tension, whether your dancer or singer or whatever. And and if you can get in that place while you're performing or while you're doing what you're doing, it moves other people. Yeah, because there's no ego involved and it's it's you being in the moment. And that just sounds like you being in the moment, like I'm trying to do that every second of my life and I'll catch myself not being in the moment. Get yourself back in the moment, because this, this moment in time, is what you're here for. You don't know that you'll here, be here tomorrow.
Speaker 1:The only thing that exists. The past doesn't exist. The future doesn't exist. The only thing is this is right now, and that's what God, that that's what I believe.
Speaker 2:That absolutely 100%. Yeah, absolutely 100%.
Speaker 1:Well, I hated this conversation. I could talk to you all day, but I do have a therapy appointment.
Speaker 2:Hey, this was fun. I don't talk about this stuff a lot, so it's great.
Speaker 1:And I, you know I'm gonna invite everybody in the podcast. If you have questions, especially like technical questions, send them to us. I would love to for you and I to come back in a little while and do a Q&A session, maybe answer some people's questions. Use this like a wonderful memory and technical knowledge that you have. I love you so much.
Speaker 2:If there are other things that you will leave us, that you want to leave us with before you go, I just want to let you know I love you and I support you and everything that you do, and I think this book that you're writing is life-changing. It's exactly the way I feel that I had to leave the church to find God. I had to find God on my own and I think everybody has to take that journey. Everybody has to take the train. If you don't take that journey, have you really found God or have you really just taken somebody else's word for it? You know, and there is, there is true happiness on the other side. I'm happier now than I've ever been in my entire life. I'm I got chills saying that I'm more confident now. I I'm more busy and action implemented and doing things that I know God wants me to do. So I believe that go past the abomination. Go past it.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Brittany. That's beautiful advice. Thank you. I love you, I love you too.
Speaker 2:Have a great day, okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining me on this journey. If you enjoyed this episode, the best way to show your support is to subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcast, also, share your thoughts by leaving a five-star review. It really helps more people to find this space. Want to go deeper? Head over to my website. At leaving the church to find God calm there, you can make a donation and make sure that we continue to have these conversations, no matter where you are on your spiritual journey. If you or someone you know would like to join the podcast and tell your story, please reach out to me on Instagram at authentically melly. Remember you're not alone on this journey. Keep exploring, keep asking questions and keep finding your own unique connection to something greater. Until next time, stay authentic, stay open and aloha.