I'm an atheist, formerly a devout catholic. I shifted away from it as I was realizing how little sense it made, and eventually, much later into my atheism, I realized that my need for God was specifically to feel like the kids who bullied me were gonna go to hell, and that my suffering would be rewarded. It was very eye-opening about why people might seek out religion, but I'm already digressing

It's comforting to know that no one is judging me for my mistakes, that I'm allowed to try and fail. It's also comforting to know that there IS an end, that I don't have to worry about what comes after it. It allows me to live life thinking about the things that matter, the people here on earth, my body, the planet itself, whether or not my single measly life will actually feel fulfilled. It leads me to seek and desire actual happiness instead of delusional wish-fulfillment. I don't want false hope; I want real happiness that isn't informed by a need to cope. Shit's hard enough without a judgemental abusive father figure threatening to set me on fire if I don't worship him the right way

See, I'm a nature lover. I love animals, and tress, and the beautiful magnificence of this earthly space. There is beauty in the shining sun, and the songs of birds, and in a grizzly way, even in the cycles of life and death. There is a grotesque beauty in shear chaos of reality, even when it sucks to live through. Christianity, at least contemporaneously, feels like such a strict divide between the earthly and the divine. The words profane, arcane, and mundane are all connected, mundane, meaning "of this earth" and arcane meaning of "heaven". The profane and arcane are explicitly separated from the natural world in a way that just disgusts me. Through thousands of years of dogma and mutable mythology, the implication of ourselves as earthly, strictly separated from the divine is borderline insulting. We are explicitly called filthy and dirty and lesser, below the arcane, and then demanded to worship by threat of being thrust even lower, into the profane, by a God who swears he's too good for us. Fuck him

God reminds me of my abusive father. He says he loves you, unconditionally, but you have to worship him, else you go to hell. He's the best at everything, knows everything, yet doesn't have the foresight he forces you believe he has to maybe just put the tree of Eden in an inaccessible place, and then when something goes wrong because of his failings, he blames his children, and then punishes their children for mistakes they never committed. God is a narcissist, and in seeing that, I have learned how to escape from the abusive men in my life

(And just a disclaimer here that I understand people will interpret god differently. Someone else may have an entirely different perception of God, but if you're gonna tell me I'm misinterpreting him, someone from one of the countless other sects of that religion will say the same of you)