How the Bible Went from Being a Holy Book to an Ordinary Book to Me
I used to be obsessed with the Bible.
From a young age, I was trained to know the Bible like the back of my hands.
In Children’s Church, the teacher would throw out a Bible verse, and we would thumb through our Bibles ferociously to locate the verse. Then, I’d grin smugly when I find the verse ahead of my peers.
We each had our own Bible, of course. Mine was full of highlighted passages and notes in the margins. I’d memorize Bible verses, because apparently I’m supposed to wield these verses like a sword.
I subscribed to this full-heartedly for many years.
Even way into adulthood and my career as an airline pilot, I’d memorize scripture in the cockpit.
But now as a 30-year-old woman, I realized just how wrong everything was.
I grew up in an Evangelical Christian community.
Evangelicals, like all Protestant Christians, believe that all of mankind are sinners (okay), including newborn babies (okay?), and therefore we are all destined to burn in hell for all eternity (okay???).
But there is an escape! All we have to do is believe that Jesus, who is God, died on the cross for our sins. Belief, not actions, gets us to heaven, we’re told. (Which is suspicious, because isn’t believing a verb?)
Evangelicals are especially committed to this doctrine, and they prioritize spreading the gospel over doing social work.
Many non-Evangelical churches are invested in welfare outreach like orphanages, schools for special-needs kids, feeding the homeless, etc.
Meanwhile, most Evangelicals are determined to convert everybody to Christianity. So even when they have welfare programs, it is to pull the recipients of the goodwill into the faith.
This way of conversion through outreach programs, to me, feels like they have completely missed the point.
Evangelicals are taught from a young age to defend the faith and the Bible.
They pride themselves in “knowing the Bible”. They believe it has all the answers to life and knowing it well puts them ahead of everybody else.
So around puberty, we were trained in apologetics, aka the defense of the Christian faith.
One example of how cringey this made me sound to others is when during Pendidikan Moral class in Form 1, the teacher asked, “There is so much to be grateful for in this world, so what are you grateful for?”
My hand shot up instantly and I leaped off the chair. “I am thankful that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins so that I can go to heaven and not hell!!” I declared loudly to an amused look on the teacher’s face.
Boy. Looking back, I was such an annoying kid.
When my friends would ask me about Christianity, I used to think I had all the answers. This is how a typical conversation would go:
Genuinely curious person: What happens after death?
Me, a zealous Evangelical Christian: You go to heaven if you believe in Jesus. You go to hell if you don’t.
Curious person: How do you know that?
Me: *Recites Bible verse*
Curious person: How do you know that the Bible is true?
Me: *Recites another Bible verse*
Basically, the circular logic is that I am right because the Bible says so. And the Bible is right because the Bible says so.
And when that doesn’t work, we were taught to throw in a couple of syllogisms.
Here’s an example of syllogism: All cats are mortal. Socrates is mortal. Therefore, Socrates is a cat.
Similarly, Jesus helped you pass your exam. Jesus is in the Bible. Therefore, the Bible is true.
Otherwise, we would use ‘logic’ to ‘pursuade’ you. Basically, it is a technique where we do cartwheels and backflips around your question in hopes that you get distracted and forget you ever had a question to begin with.
Curious person: If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why do some people die before they have a chance to believe in Jesus and they end up ‘going to hell’?
Christian: It is statistically possible for an omnipotent God to be benevolent if you examine the logical structure of the aforementioned proposition. First and foremost, God’s omnipotence and benevolence are not implicitly contradictory. To propose incongruity is to assume an obscured premise…
And if we hit a wall, we whip out the ultimate trump card and say: His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and His way higher than our ways. Have faith!
As you can see, it’s a lot of vanity.
Of course, questions are encouraged, which gives this brand of religion the appearance of being open-minded. You get a false sense of security that there is an open conversation—there is not.
We lull you with genuine conversations. However, we ALWAYS stop short of stepping into grounds we deem ‘dangerous’.
We appear welcoming and eager to engage with your doubts, BUT there is a giant moat that keeps you securely within the City of Safe Doctrines. Critical thinking is discouraged.
This sucks because then you’re not engaging with an idea; you are having data downloaded into your brain.
It’s good to ask questions, I’ve heard countless well-meaning yet completely ignorant church leaders say many times.
But what they actually mean is: You may ask any question you want, as long as you arrive back at this conclusion, because it’s the only conclusion you’re allowed to have.
Think of Evangelical Christian doctrines as a small box.
It is simply manipulative indoctrination. And we’re all supposed to fit in that tiny box. I spent years twisting and turning, breaking my hips, sucking it in, whatever it took to fit.
There was no wriggle room. We were told that we have to believe in all of that and more, or risk hell fire.
This is the mindset of the Evangelical Christians I grew up with. This is the environment which would have lasting effects on my psyche.
Truth is, a lot about the Bible and Evangelical theology troubled me.
Once when I was a kid, I attended a play about heaven and hell in the church I grew up in.
The play was made up of many short acts. Each act would feature people in different scenarios. Some were Christians, and some were not.
At the end of each act, the characters would die, and then either angels of demons would appear onstage to bring them to heaven or hell respectively, depending on whether they had ‘accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior’.
This was a rich mega-church, so they had plenty of money to spend. They spared nothing on the props, costumes, and lighting. Every part of it was super realistic.
It was all very impactful, especially when demons slithered onto the stage to drag a ‘soul’ to hell. The auditorium would then dim significantly as bolts of lightning flashed; the expensive sound system cracked to live with eerie laughter.
Still sends a shiver up my spine today.
One particular scene stuck with me till today.
A mother and a daughter went into a lift.
The daughter was, for the millionth time, trying to get her mother to go to church with her.
“Sorry, dear,” the mother said. “Not today. You know I’ve been busy. Especially with all the social work I’ve been doing with the orphans.”
Suddenly, the lift jerked to a stop. Mother and daughter struggled to steady themselves.
Then, the cable broke or something? Doesn’t matter, because mother and daughter plunged to their death.
They eventually regained consciousness.
And saw an angel.
The angel extended a hand to the daughter. She took it.
Next, she turned around to take her mother with her but…
Demons appeared.
“NNNOOOOOOO!!!!!!” cried the daughter as she watched the demons drag her mother away to hell, kicking and screaming.
The hissing demons refused to loosen their grip on the mother, no matter how desperately she begged. She tried to reach for her daughter as the demons dragged her further and further away.
“NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” the daughter’s wailing echoed through the chilly auditorium.
That scene left young me shaking with fear.
But it also left something inside of me—let’s call it a splinter.
So you’re telling me that this charitable mother who helped the needy went to hell?
The mother devoted a lot of her time helping people in need. Meanwhile, as far as the narrative portrayed, all the daughter did was go to church to sing hallelujah.
The daughter can go to heaven, I have no qualms about that.
But the mother? She who was doing good on earth, improving this messed up world, got cast into an eternity of torment simply because she didn’t believe the right things?
That didn’t sit right with me. And hence, a splinter was formed.
That was not the only splinter. It was only one in a sea of hundreds.
One mere article does not do justice to the splinters I’ve had.
But try, I will.
Another significant splinter I had is a story in the Bible about King David, the ‘man after God’s own heart’.
King David defeated the Moabites in battle.
Glowing in victory, he made all the Moabites lie down on the ground in a straight line. Next, he measured them with a length of cord.
Every two lengths of the cord, he put the men to death. Only the man of the third length was allowed to live.
I first read this story as a young kid, and it gave me nightmares for ages.
I’m not asking for King David to be perfect, because nobody is perfect.
There was a time when he coveted an attractive woman, Bathsheba, and had her husband murdered so that he could have her.
When the gravity of what he did hit him, he wept and repented.
And we all acknowledge that he screwed up.
But it’s a very different case with this story.
King David wantonly murdered, yet he was portrayed as the hero of the story?
So are you telling me that the God of the Bible applauds massacres?
If God does support massacres, then does he support the Cambodian genocide, the Palestinian killings, or the Holocaust?
This huge splinter was a lot for young me to bear.
The older I got, the more splinters I accumulated.
I saw firsthand how homophobic the church could be. Splinter.
I saw firsthand how transphobic the church could be. Splinter.
I saw firsthand how misogynistic the church could be. Splinter.
Again and again, I saw broken people get pushed into dark places.
And all of that, the church justified with the Bible.
“I would like to go back to what the Bible says,” a different pompous face would say each time, haughty AF, because apparently that book matters more than actual real-life hurting people.
The splinters started to wear me down.
Yet I still clung on to the Bible, because that was what I was taught.
Everything I believed in could be traced back to the Bible.
The origin of the universe. The solution to the problem of evil. The secret to a successful marriage. The rules of money management. The value of pi. Everything.
But one night, a thought crept into my head, like a thief in the cover of the darkness.
What if the Bible is actually nothing more than a human book?
The thought scared me. It was akin to solid ground crumbling beneath my feet.
I was so terrified, I made my husband go to the bathroom with me.
A grown-ass woman should be able to go to the bathroom on her own.
But there was one dark and rainy night when I, a grown-ass woman, could not.
I didn’t want to go to the bathroom alone in a world where the Bible is not true.
As a kid, were you ever afraid of seeing a ghost if you went to the bathroom alone at night? That was how I felt. If there is no Biblical God looking out for me, what’s going to protect me from ghosts, life, and other human beings?
I might sound like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. That’s the kind of reverence Evangelicals are trained to have for the Bible.
But you can’t ignore splinters.
If you ever had one, you’ll know what I mean.
It was uncomfortable with one splinter. It started to get truly frustrating with ten.
At the hundred mark, it was just pure agony.
So, I did the only thing left to do: I quit church.
I don’t mean merely withdrawing my church attendance. I mean a total recall of almost every faith-related thing I’ve ever believed in.
I had no more anchor. No more compass.
I didn’t know what to make of the Bible anymore.
I didn’t know what to make of the world anymore.
I found others like me and we bonded.
I met a friend of a friend. And she introduced me to another friend.
She introduced me to more friends, who in turn introduced me to even more friends.
That’s when I found out that there’s a whole plethora of people like me out there. People who share my values, and are horrified by the same things that petrify me.
They are people who, like me, grew up in church, and accumulated splinters of their own.
We became each other’s community.
We’ll have long zoom calls where we unpack the trauma, and we have book clubs where we read all kinds of faith-themed books.
We are progressives, with values that might shock the church, but we feel very strongly about.
And I finally began to heal.
More than a year after my departure from church, I was ready to dip my toes into churchy waters again.
I don’t mean back into a church community in the traditional sense—that would take more than wild horses.
I meant, I was ready to venture beyond my group of progressive friends, because the last thing I ever want is to be stuck in another echo chamber.
So I signed up for a seminary class. A seminary is a college for priests and pastors, or anyone seeking a degree in Biblical studies.
I picked the seminary that has the reputation of being the most academic in Malaysia. I wanted to study the Bible without the churchy noise.
Despite all my criticisms of Christianity, I actually enjoy reading theology and Biblical scholarship. I just want to study it without the fear of being judged for asking the wrong questions.
And the seminary seemed welcoming at first. So I went beyond merely dipping my toes.
I put a whole foot in, then a leg. I gently lowered myself further until I was waist deep, which is when I realized: It’s not water.
It’s acid.
Classes actually started out pleasant.
I learned a lot. As time passed, I started participating more, sometimes putting forward ideas that are unorthodox, even outright questioning cherished church doctrine.
This one lecturer, I was coming to really enjoy his lessons. He attended a progressive seminary and is immensely knowledgeable. He entertained my theories, and even introduced Biblical scholarship that might give my Children Church teachers a heart attack.
Then things turned sour one day. Somehow, it was like he came to a sudden revelation and made a 180-degree turn.
He openly berated me, even on things I told him in private. Things that he deemed ‘heresy’.
He repeated, again and again, that he did not want word to get out that he does not have ‘sound doctrine’.
Hence reinforcing my initial suspicion: many Christians are more worried about believing the ‘wrong thing’ than they are of actually doing the wrong thing.
Because, you know, belief gets you to heaven.
Going to seminary was an attempt at getting my old life back, but it ended in failure. It hurt more this time, in a different way.
This experience with seminary came on the heels of a painful experience with a Christian publication.
A Christian publication in Malaysia reached out and invited me to write for them.
It was a real honour, and I was very excited.
I thought I was finally getting a seat at the table. At last, my voice was valid.
I worked hard on my article—a case for deconstruction of our current toxic doctrines. I had my friend vet it, then rewrote bits and pieces.
Because at the end of the day, the Bible is a book, I wrote. It is a symphony of words and sentences. It is a collection of origin stories and skewed narratives and laws and war anecdotes and folklores and letters and poetry and soft porn and apocalyptic tales.
Theology is when we take stray sentences from different corners of the Bible, weave them together, then read our worldview into this concoction of words.
Our worldview is how we think and how we operate. It is a product of our environment. A community who has little contact with modern civilization might think that mountains cure illnesses, bring rain, and provide longevity. That’s their worldview. We think mountains are inanimate objects that hold no supernatural power. That’s our worldview. They think paper money are inanimate objects good as nothing more than biomass to produce heat. This is their worldview. We think paper money is the reason to live. This is our worldview.
Our theology is a reflection of our worldview, not the other way around, I proposed. Our worldview is not a reflection of our theology.
I went on to argue that that’s why theology is a social contract. It is constantly changing; should be constantly changing. As civilization matures, thoughts progress, and science advances, our worldviews change, and hence our theology should change too.
The editor of the publication was very sweet.
He told me nicely that he would publish my article if it were up to him, but he answers to a board, and the board thinks that I’m ‘questioning the Bible’.
Basically, they were not going to publish my article.
After a bit of back-and-forth with him, I’ll admit that I, as a grown ass woman, cried. I cried like I did next to my mother’s coffin. I cried in my car, cried in the shower, cried at the dining table, and cried in bed.
Now, as a writer, one gets used to rejection pretty early on. At this point, I’ve heard different versions of “your writing sucks, you ugly bitch,” and it doesn’t bother me as much anymore.
But this was different. They didn’t criticize my writing skills.
What they did was tell me that my opinion is not valid, and there is no room for conversation. So I had better fall into line, or I am never going to fit in.
I received their message loud and clear: there is no room for me at the table.
It is their way, or the hell-way.
And it hurt like hell.
Recently, I was asked about the loss I experienced upon losing my faith.
So I replied frankly.
I’ve found solitude in my progressive friends. Sure, I left some friends behind in church, definitely burned a couple of bridges on my way out of the church doors, but clearly those friendships were not worth having.
I grieved.
Many Christians would assign the likes of me a whole variety of names: backslider, lukewarm, weak in faith, doubting Thomas, bad testimony, or, if you’e female: woman with the Jezebel spirit.
Clearly, they don’t know that losing one’s faith can be a very painful process. Most people don’t just wake up one day and think, “What a beautiful morning! I think today, I’ll rip away the core of my psychological make-up so I can enjoy the sensation of sinking through quicksand until the point where I’m gasping like Darth Vader without his mask.”
It’s like grieving the death of a loved one. You go through all the five stages of grief.
I often get asked what my beliefs are now.
I don’t have a creed. I prefer not to rattle off a list of things I believe in, do-or-die.
Instead, I’ll say what I don’t believe in.
I don’t believe that God will send people to hell for believing the wrong thing.
I don’t think believing in the divinity of Jesus is a condition to living an upright life.
I absolutely reject the notion that members of the LGBTQIA++ community are sinning against God.
I completely disagree that wives are subservient to their husbands. Every relationship dynamic is different. There is no point in forcing the man to be the leader in every heterosexual relationship.
Of course, I still see value in the Bible, and I know that much of the chaos that ensued from Evangelical Christianity is in the way they interpret the Bible, and not the Bible per se.
Nonetheless, I am firm in thinking that the Bible should not be our beacon. It should not be our go-to, nor our compass. Maybe a supplement, but even then, just an optional suppement.
Yet, all things considered, I could try to shut off my mind and play it safe. Just believe whatever the church tells me, in case the Evangelical Christians are right after all.
Pascal’s wager: better believe just in case. Worst case scenario, we’re wrong, and nothing happens after death. Best case scenario, we get to heaven!
Except, splinters don’t work that way. Faith certainly doesn’t.
And I really do not have the mental capacity to do all that mental gymnastics anymore.
