Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion

The absence of trust in one’s own authentic identity is a powerful motivator to place trust in other things, hoping they will help us understand who we are. Coupled with a lifetime of results in which our adapted self has worked fairly well for us, discovering a different way of being is no small task.

In clinical observations over the years, guilt emerges as the most frequent reason for which people give up their religion. It is because the goals seem unobtainable. Ask yourself what has made these goals seem unobtainable. It will always be the disparity between what one is taught they should be, as compared to what they perceive they really are.

Since we have all been taught that God is the supreme authority, our images of God are distorted in whatever direction our early childhood experiences with authority were distorted. If we experienced authority as punitive, we will expect a harsh, judgmental God. Hence we may resist finding our own Godselves for fear that we will meet self-judgment

The fundamental agenda of the lower self is to convince us that we and life are bad, untrustworthy, and hopeless, so that we will maintain our defensive separateness and not surrender to the Life Force or God within and around us. Our negative intentions are an expression of our deepest fears that the lower self is our ultimate reality. That is why