I grew up Catholic and went to a Baptist youth group, so I got a pretty wide variety of religious viewpoints to choose from. For the longest time, I never thought about religion too seriously. I went along with my friends and family, and hung on to the words of my priest and my youth leader. I brought my Catholic Bible to my Baptist youth group and highlighted and read and studied with everyone else. When I turned 13 I got saved at a Fields of Faith, even though to the Catholic me that meant close to nothing—but it felt monumental at the time.

From my 13 year old self onward, I began a journey of increased spiritual enlightenment—but as the years went on and I grew more mature in my thinking, this meant that I began to question things.What was always strange to me was how questioning was seen as a terrible thing to my religious community. To doubt was the influence of the devil, and could be defeated with faith—blind faith. But to me, blindly accepting the words of my pastors and priests and even the Bible started to alienate me from the enlightened state of being I once was in.

For starters, the idea of eternal damnation didn’t resonate with what I believed to be God. It seemed like such a strange concept to coexist with a God of love and compassion, who apparently died for everyone’s sins out of unconditional love. I couldn’t believe that that was how the system worked, nor could I accept that my God would create such a system. As I continued to attend church, although I tried to keep an open mind, the words that once fell upon my ears so easily now seemed to attack them. I tried to ask questions, to find the answer that would lead me back to my comfortable belief. Nothing worked.

I spent many a night thinking about this concept of eternal damnation and hell. And the more I thought, the more online discussion forums I read late at night, the more that the idea didn’t make sense. And I suppose that was it. That was the moment where I first began the break away from the religious label that I had always held so dear. I started referring to my religion as Unitarian Universalist—a Christian who believed that everyone was saved.

It didn’t take long for more irregularities to occur—mostly small things, but things that I caught only after this major decision of mine opened my mind past the constraints of my small town church. I knew a lot of LGBT people online, and had read their stories. There were none that were well known in my hometown, which might have been why it was so easy for others to decide how they operated—it was a sin, a choice, an abomination. Some conceded that it was God’s place to judge, though they still showed little of an open mind. I was one of the few (if there were others, they were silent) who openly denied this claim, insisting that being gay was not a choice, but the way that God made his creations, and that they should be treated just like anyone else and allowed to love just the same. My opinion never caught ground, it seemed. It was just miraculous to me how quickly and easily people would denounce my claims: not just about the LGBT community, but about anything I questioned. I could never just agree with them and move on so comfortably, like they did. Once I began to open my mind, there was no turning back.

These were confusing years of my life, because I was striving for a label, for a niche to belong to in my small town. I yearned to attend a church service where every word would ring true in my mind and connect me once again to the Holy Spirit—I eventually grew sound enough in my beliefs to tune out the things that attacked my ears, seeing past the actual words to the bigger picture, and once again I could connect with the God I had always known.

I happened across the book God Without Religion by Sankara Saranam. I bought it almost without a second thought off Amazon after reading the title and the reviews. It was like a breath of life to see something that so accurately described what I was feeling. And within the first few chapters, it started to make so much sense. Before chapter 2 was done, I had broken away from religious doctrine completely.

I began to see the world through a different lens. I had never felt a stronger connection to God—and while I still saw God as the Christian God I had always been taught, God to me was so much bigger that Christianity. It was every God that humanity had ever created; it was the highest peak of spiritual enlightenment; it was in everything and everyone, moving throughout the world (it strangely started to sound like the Force from

Star Wars). God was so much bigger, but also more inclusive, and this new viewpoint gave me a more positive look towards the rest of the world than the Christianity that I grew up in ever did. It inspired me to love so much more than before. Gone were the days of doubt and confusion. Now, the freedom to pursue the path towards God was mine to take.

I still shy away from religious labels. I find them constricting, and I've grown averse to the idea of blindly accepting things: because I began to see that these things that people would blindly accept hurt a lot of the people I loved, and it made a lot of people treat others in a way that wasn't loving or positively affecting. I began to judge my actions on how they affected people, rather than what I was told was right, simply because it was "God's way". And while I respect my friends who still embrace religion, and still see the good that religion does in some people, I am comfortable in saying that I no longer belong to the doctrine nor the religion, though my belief in God has never been stronger.

My spiritual journey is not done, but it has started in a new light. It is possible to believe in God without accepting the outdated doctrine of the church, or of any religion for that matter. I believe that spirituality is something much bigger and grander - and it's something that everyone needs to find for themselves.