All Churhes Are Cults Essay, Research Paper

Most people go to church to maintain their faith in God; for me, going to church made me loose mine.

The church I attended was called Faith Baptist. It was a small, shabby, old church, not an exceedingly old church with stunning architecture, but a plain, modern church that had grown old and run down. The building consisted of a square gymnasium with worn tape marks on the floor, about five or six tiny classrooms, a nursery, a chapel, and of course, the sanctuary, lined with rows and rows of wooden pews facing towards a wooden cross stretching form the floor to the ceiling.

Every Sunday I would walk into the church across the worn brown carpet and up the stairs to the musty room where my Sunday school class met. Every week the teachers, Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, would present to us unusual ideas and unbelievable stories from the bible and try to scare us into believing whatever they told us. They would tell us about the ?Rapture?, which most simply states that one day Jesus will come back to earth and kill everyone that doesn?t believe in him. They told us how abortion is wrong; it?s the same as killing someone. They told us how homosexuals will go to hell because they are horrible sinners. They told us how Jesus died and ?rose again?, and most importantly, they told us how God is the only one who could judge us.

I always listened to them, and I thought that I believed, but something was never quite right. As time progressed, the thing that wasn?t right became very clear. So many of the things they had taught us contradicted each other, like ?You don?t need money to worship God?, yet they passed around an offering plate. The contradiction that bothered me the most was that they said God was the only one who could judge people, and they judged people all the time. They judged people who were homosexual, people who were divorced, people who had abortions, and people who had a different religion.

This contradiction led me into the experience that finally pushed me over the edge. It was when Mr. and Mrs. Sweet decided to do a study of ?cults? during Sunday school class. They came prepared with pamphlets and printed information from books about other religions. They gave each of us a forest green folder and a copy of the information for each religion, so we could save it because it was so important. Then, each week we would take out our folder and Mr. and Mrs. Sweet would give us a new cult religion to put in it. We started out with Buddhism and Muslim religions, which were so different from baptism that calling them cults didn?t seem too unreasonable. However, after that, we moved on to Mormon and Catholics religions, and I could see no way in which they could be called cults. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet came up with a way to show that every religion besides baptism was a cult. But it didn?t even stop there; Mrs. Sweet told us that The Lion King, yes, Disney?s The Lion King was a ?cultic movie? and she regretted every letting her grandchildren watch it. She said because the movie talked about the circle of life that it was about reincarnation, something Baptists don?t believe in, thus making it cultic. When she said this to us I had to hold my mouth shut so I wouldn?t laugh in her face. That was and still is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.

After those eight weeks of ?cult? study I could no longer comprehend how people could go to church and listen to and believe anything that was said there. I realized that those people and their beliefs were insane, unfounded, and of no use to me, so I quit going to church. I quit forcing myself to believe in something that didn?t make any sense, and had no proof or logic behind it just because I was scared of what would happen to me when I die. I still don?t know what will happen to me, and I?m still scared, but I don?t see any point in wasting the time I have in a church worshiping a god that doesn?t even exist.