Description

The Coming Out of Religion book

Deconstructing Christianity for survivors of
religious abuse and conversion therapy

This is 4th edition of my book, specifically designed to help Rainbow survivors of religious abuse and conversion therapy who are unravelling the mess, confusion and lies that engulfed their lives for far too long.

It’s a meticulous journey looking at “why we believe the things we believe”, the damage this has done, and finding a way forward that’s built on self-worth and love.

Excerpt from the Preface:

In this book, my goal is to help you discover and understand the complex issues of sexuality and gender, the nature and workings of our mind and our personal and unique paradigms, and how that affects our understanding of religion and spirituality, the workings of conversion therapy and religious abuse and, finally, to provide a whole new way of seeing life!

Integrity (the inner sense of “wholeness” deriving from qualities such as honesty and consistency of character ~ Wikipedia) is a very important part of my life, so the act of recognising my own biases and paradigms has been a huge part of my journey. A large part of the book will be around attempting to free us from the need to embrace dogmatic religion and recognise the true extent of subjectivity in our beliefs.

I’ll be challenging you to ask questions, to dig deep, to step out of the status quo, to not be afraid of where the questions take you, and to be confident that in the end, love is the only constant and the only thing that matters.

But before we can look at the issues in any depth, we first must look at what we are actually talking about at the most basic levels.

We all know that sexuality and gender are an integral part of our sense of identity.

In terms of our daily struggles and relationships and interactions with our fellow humans, our sexual and gender identities are extremely important and affect just about every aspect of our lives.

Religious beliefs (for me, that mostly refers to Christianity because of my own experience) have consistently tried to define our sexuality and gender in a simple binary concept – male or female as described by our physical bodies and outward characteristics. For traditional and fundamentalist Christianity, there are no other variations to that formula, and to even consider anything outside that duality is questioning the very nature of God and how he created us.

But the facts reveal a much bigger picture.

The last 50 years or so have seen a lot of research in this area that is constantly expanding as scientists and medical professionals from all disciplines begin to focus on this strange conundrum that defines us so dramatically.

One very important aspect of this book is the need for you to do your own research.

My own research has helped me to unravel, or deconstruct, religion, sexuality and gender and, from that space, build a system of beliefs that works for me and is constantly evolving as I continue to learn and grow.

One of our human weaknesses is to expect others to think for us, to do the hard yards on our behalf so we can just pick the voice that we feel most comfortable with and run with it.

We have our favourite preachers/teachers/gurus because they do the spiritual/religious work for us and then dish it out in bite-sized chunks, and we never even think that we can actually do this for ourselves.

My aim is to present the big picture with as much relevant detail as possible – to expose the flaws in the fundamental approach to understanding the issues – and to challenge the religious mindset that only sees black and white because God apparently only sees the same way.