FREE ESSAY ON ALL CHURHES ARE CULTS

ALL CHURHES ARE CULTS

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.