Notes
Listen to this episode on Youtube
Ex-Christian bible teacher shares his story of how religion screwed up his life, the dangers of religion on the human psyche, and alternatives to a happier, fulfilled life.
Chapters:
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:17 Intro music
- 1:00 WHY I left religion
- 4:50 Attacking the Bible destroys faith
- 5:15 Ex-pastor Dr. Ray Hagins
- 5:47 How can I leave a faith of 30 years
- 6:48 HOW I left religion (the gradual process)
- 7:02 Leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses
- 13:08 Leaving the Baptist Church
- 18:20 Leaving the Pentecostal Church
- 18:47 Leaving the Evangelical Church
- 20:36 Searching for a church home
- 21:00 Starting a ministry
- 22:06 The idea of two churches
- 25:14 I started to think for myself
- 25:37 Conclusion recap
- 26:10 I’m not going back
- 26:22 My views on the Bible
- 27:00 True origins of Christianity
- 28:18 Outro and music
Transcript
What’s up, good people?
This is Neil Real and this is the Apostate Apple broadcast back again talking about why I left Christian religion and how I left Christian religion.
Let’s get right into that.
Key points.
So I was on a sabbatical.
I had just got finished series of teachings within a series called Sex and Family.
And within that series, I discovered that there was a emasculation going on amongst men within, at least in American culture, at least or Westernized cultures.
So I wanted to focus on myself and be a better man.
And I was also kind of displeased that the Bible didn’t speak too much about this.
I believe the devil’s program to emasculate men.
So I told everybody in my ministry, people were following me online at the time.
I had a website.
It’s still up to this day.
You can go to www.letspleasegod.com
www.letspleasegod.com
The website is archived, but that’s evidence of who I used to be as a Bible teacher.
So I told everybody I got to take a sabbatical because I want to focus on myself and be a better person.
And the week I didn’t have to create a sermon anymore.
The week I didn’t have to study to prepare a sermon anymore.
It was the week that I had the most clarity.
And I was online and I came across an exor that pretty much exposed that the Bible was plagiarized, that many of the stories were copied from older text, and it just resonated with me and also discovered the Bible was fabricated.
And there’s things in it that’s just contradictions that don’t make sense and there’s no way around them.
At this point, I remember people claiming there was contradictions, but I was always able to, as a Bible teacher, defend the faith and really show them that’s not a contradiction.
The Bible is still true.
It’s still the authoritative, the word of God or whatever.
So at this point, I just dropped it all.
I said, wow, okay.
Now I didn’t tell my congregation off the bat, hey, I’m leaving because I just read this post or this video.
I did some more research, and I studied for maybe six months or so, I’m not sure how long.
And then I eventually came back and told everybody, I’m not coming back.
I’m not a Christian anymore.
I’m done with this.
And all it took was a few videos and something just resonated with me.
I was able to think for myself for the first time because up until that point, everything was for God.
Every week I’m developing a sermon, every week I’m studying the scriptures.
Every week I’m preparing an outline to record, to give to the people.
So there’s no room for me thinking, hey, is this faith even correct?
Is this stuff even legitimate?
It was just this is what it is, and it is all I knew.
If you listen to my last podcast, you knew I grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness.
And I was taught that there was a God and there was Jesus Christ.
And that all this from a very young age, I think even younger than five years old.
So I’m completely indoctrinated.
I have no evidence outside of this to suggest anything else.
Anything that criticizes Christianity is always kind of put down, and you’re told not to even look at it.
And then when people do criticize it.
When I got older as a Bible teacher, I was always able to destroy, you know, what they were saying, because their points was just not that valid.
And it just made me stronger in my faith.
But, you know, when you attack the Bible, and this is for any atheist or anybody who wants to shut down a Christian, just deal with their Bible because that’s the root of their religion.
And if you can show that the Bible is not accurate, it’s been plagiarized, you know, these stolen stories.
And then that’s where you shatter the faith and the whole thing goes crumbling down.
So that’s what happened for me.
And this was the first time somebody actually did this.
And this guy was an Ex-Pastor.
He showed how he really was a believer, and he just came across his information and said, wow, okay, I’ve been believing a lot.
So he switched up.
His name was Ray Hagen, by the way.
He has his own ministry.
But those few nuggets he dropped for me was helpful to me to lead me into doing my own research and coming across more information and just realizing that this Bible was a mess.
So just like that, I left.
And I can hear people saying, how can you just leave a faith of over 30 years from a few videos?
And the reason why I can is because I got my own mind and I can think for myself.
And once you get that fog of religion or Christian belief systems off your head, you can kind of put two and two together.
Your spirit tells you, hey, something is off, something’s off.
And that’s all it was for me.
And then I could see all the suffering from the past, everything that the Scripture was telling me to put up with in a take and somehow I’m going to have heaven is all BS.
That’s how it happened.
That’s how I left the faith.
Now, I actually left.
It was gradual.
So this is how I left the faith.
That was why I left the faith was basically because I was on sabbatical and I came across some information that pretty much destroyed the validity of the Bible.
So now here’s how I left Christian religion.
So this was always happening for me.
I learned something new about the Scriptures, and then I end up moving into a different space in Christianity.
So first I grew up in a Christian religion called the Jehovah’s Witness.
It’s more of a sect and a denomination of Christianity.
It’s a sect.
And because of heavy burdens and field service quotas and public speaking, at one point, I was doing a five minute sermon twice a month.
And so to show you how this works is basically they have something called a Theocratic ministry school in the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And what it’s designed to do is to teach you how to become an elder and a speaker.
So some of my teaching or my public speaking skills came from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
So what happened was they constantly are getting different people to take on a sermon for the week.
Every week you have to make up a sermon and get up there, and they alternate between all the publisher males in the Kingdom hall or the church.
And what they would do is have them prepare a sermon, and if they go up there, and then they have to get graded on how they speak and all this other stuff.
So people were canceling.
They would get an assignment from the elder that was managing these sermons that people had to present in front of the congregation every week.
And this was in front of two to 300 people every week.
So people would cancel, and I would end up having to fill in.
And the problem was I couldn’t say no.
I didn’t know how to say no.
I thought if I say no, I would be saying no to God.
So I kept saying yes, and I had to keep preparing these sermons, okay, and getting up here in front of these people.
And then eventually it caught up with me because I wasn’t preparing, and now I’m looking stupid.
I’m fumbling over my words, and it’s because I’m not preparing, because I really don’t want to do this anymore.
And it was at this last session where I ended up just really bombing on stage.
And despite one of the sisters giving me some encouragement, I felt bad about it.
And I said, I don’t want to be up here ever again.
I’m sick of this.
But I didn’t make a decision to leave at that moment.
It was until an elder came to me and said, yo, Neil, your hours are low.
Your quota for knocking on doors and preaching the good news of God’s kingdom is low.
And so we had these little field ministry sheets that we had to fill in to show how many houses we’ve been knocking on doors, how many tracks we placed, and how many hours we spent out in field service.
And my field service hours were low.
And so here he is coming to me, scolding me basically about what’s up?
And I’m just like, look, man, I lost the faith at this point.
I don’t give a f***.
I’m sick of these sermons I got to do, and I’m sick of this d*** ministry quota that you bother me about.
It feels more like you work for sales at a corporation and you got to get some numbers up or something like that.
It’s bullshit.
And this is to a 15 year old kid.
I’m a 15 year old kid and I’m I got to do this s***.
And and and just to go back into this, this is a a position called a publisher within the ranks of the of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And I never really wanted to do that.
I never really wanted to sign up for this.
But it was like, if you say no, you’re saying no to God.
I remember my parents, my dad, Pacific, saying, hey, Neil, do you want to be a publisher?
And nobody gave me the answer, hey, you know, if you don’t want to do it, it’s fine.
It’s okay.
They’re looking at me like, you need to do this.
You need to join up with us.
And I’m like, yeah, fine.
But I wish I was given the answer of no and it would be okay if I said no.
But nevertheless, they want their children to be just like them and so they kind of lead you into being what they are.
And so I ended up becoming a publisher around ten years old.
And then by the time, like I said, 15 years old, I’m doing all these sermons in front of people and I’m knocking on doors and stuff like that.
I never actually brought anybody to the church or to the religion, though, by the way, and I’m thankful for that.
But anyway, that got on my nerves to the point to where I told the people I have no faith.
They brought me and my parents into the back room to discuss why I no longer want to be a Jehovah’s Witness.
And they started asking me all these questions like, yo, Neil, so are you in sin or are you having sex?
I just lied and said I was having sex because I knew that they would let go of people who committed fornication.
So I lied.
I don’t think they believed me, though.
But eventually they kept saying, well, it seemed to suggest that, oh, it’s okay if you’re having sex, we’ll still let you still be here.
And I really wanted to get out, like, release me from this.
I don’t want to be a part of it.
So I kept persisting.
I don’t want to be a part of this.
And then they said, okay, you do know that God is going to torment you before he kills you, right?
And this is to a 15 year old, and I didn’t give a f***.
You’re fine.
That’s fine.
As long as I ain’t got to do this s*** no more.
Long as I ain’t got to knock on these God d*** doors.
As long as I ain’t got to be up on a f****** podium in front of two to 300 people every other week or so having to prepare this message and preach something from the Bible.
I don’t give a f*** about.
So anyway I get out of that and that’s the first phase of leaving religion.
And later on I was free for about six, I don’t know, five or six years where I didn’t do any religious stuff.
And during that time I was actually able to live a little bit.
But then unfortunately at this point in my life I come across a Christian.
At this point I’m self employed and he needs a website for his Christian ministry hip hop group.
And they are programmed to evangelize and try to get you into the church.
I went at his invitation because I still was open to spirituality and I didn’t know what I was getting into.
So I ended up becoming a Baptist Christian.
They didn’t really use the denomination but that was the name of the church that had Baptists in it.
So I was there and I ended up leaving because of hypocrisy.
And I was there for about four years.
Nothing but hypocrisy.
People doing what the f*** they want to do.
Nobody’s following the Bible, complete lack of love, heresy.
The scripture says one thing, the Bible pastor is teaching another.
Nobody loves one another.
Women are upset with their husbands.
At 1.1 of the men was telling me how I love this pastor because he always takes the side of the man.
And if you have a problem with your wife and you go to him, you ain’t got nothing to worry about because he always takes the side of the man.
And I said that’s f***** up.
It’s f***** up for any woman that has legitimate issues with her husband and goes to see this pastor of a counseling because she’s not going to get any type of support.
And so I’ve seen a lot of suffering from women gossip, back biting, manipulation, control.
A lot of fornication people just ain’t following the book.
The book says all fornicators have their partner lake of fire.
But hey, we once save, always save.
Eternal security.
We’re not going to h*** for this.
And it’s like I’m the only one that’s trying to live celebrate or I’m the only one living a virgin life and the rest of you all are out here.
It’s just crazy.
So the hypocrisy, the lack of love, I just didn’t feel loved.
I just felt like I was being used.
Like most people in my life just wanted something from me.
These supposed to be my brothers and sisters and it was this place of filth, I would say spiritual filth of coldness.
They always talking about love and family, but they talking about you behind your back.
They don’t give a f*** about you and they’re using you and they’re demeaning and they want to tear you down.
And one of the biggest issues I had with the men were it was just envy because of how I looked or my talents and abilities.
I had to deal with a lot of hate and I didn’t even know what that was at the time, because they were good at masking themselves and their behavior.
Because I didn’t grow up around a father who was teaching me about people.
I didn’t know what this was, this envy, this hatred, because I didn’t have envy for people.
If you were doing well, I’ll be glad that you were doing well.
To this day, I don’t envy people, but these people did.
They were so broken inside that they needed to tear others down to feel better about themselves.
And so I experienced a lot of that, a lot of undermining going on behind the scenes and all that stuff.
I said, this is f****** crazy.
So I left the church and I said, the church is supposed to be about love.
The Bible says they will know you by your love.
And this ain’t love.
This is crazy.
So I thought to myself, this is just this church.
The pastor is corrupt.
Somehow he has allowed this to happen in his church, and I’m going to leave now.
I wrote a letter to the people in the church, the pastor, the sub pastors, the teacher, Bible teacher pastor, the youth pastor, individuals who I was close with.
And I told them, I feel like a flower being stepped on and I can’t grow.
People don’t follow the Bible.
This is a mess and I’m out of here.
And I only wrote this letter because I stopped going to church.
And people started to call me.
Where are you?
At Neil.
Why aren’t you here?
And this, that and the other.
And it got on my nerves to the point to where I just said, let me just write a letter, let these people know what’s up.
And those people just got even worse.
A lot of file email responses and you don’t love God and you ain’t this, you ain’t that.
It was a mess.
That was one of the worst experiences of my life, because I didn’t have a family that I was connected with.
And so I took on these group of people in this church as my family.
Initially, they welcomed me and brought me in, but they were these toxic people, and it was devastating for me to see them for what they were and to walk out of there.
And even as I’m saying, look, this is not a good place for me, I’m out just some of the worst email responses from that.
So that was my first check that something wrong with Christianity.
But I said to myself, it’s just this church Christianity.
Religion is fine.
It’s just the church itself is messed up.
And there are Bible passages to support what I’m saying.
It’s clear.
It talks about false brethren and bad churches and stuff like that.
So anyway, I get out of there.
I go to another church.
This is a Pentecostal church.
I was there for eight months or so.
Same kind of stuff was going on a lot of fake smiling in your face, but then in behind your back they say this, they’re saying that, a lot of envious males and just a lot of mess.
And so I say, I say here we go again, man, what’s going on?
I leave that church.
Nobody calls me, by the way, at this point.
Nobody’s trying to check up on me at all.
I go to a third church and I really think this is the one because it’s a multicultural church.
There’s Asians in there, there’s Indians, there’s blacks, there’s whites, everybody’s sitting together and it’s a big deal and same stuff is happening and so I’m leaving out of there.
And I was a Bible teacher at this point, so I was teaching the Bible in homes after church.
So people admitted that we really don’t get fed at church.
So we need some Bible scriptures and some things that happen after church.
So what we would do is after church, we would go to this house, they would host us, and I would teach the Bible along with some other brothers, and people would get something out of it eventually.
A lot of people were getting convicted by what I was teaching, by simply reading the Scriptures.
They were getting offended and they took that on me.
And so now they didn’t like me because I said things that would pretty much shed light on their life and dispose that they’re not really living like a Christian should.
And all I’m doing is reading the Bible.
I’m not going to point nobody out.
I’m not condemning nobody.
And I’m just saying we got to live for Christ.
This, that and the other.
So it ended up being a problem where now I come in a room, everybody gets quiet.
Now they’re talking about you.
Now they’re spreading rumors about you.
Now.
They don’t like Neil.
We don’t like this guy.
And it’s like, dude, I’m just reading the Bible.
You asked me to be a teacher here.
You asked me to.
So eventually I got pushed out.
I would say I remember I was slowly starting to avoid going to church and then I would get maybe some Facebook inbox messages of meaning women and just saying, you’re denying the faith and stuff like that.
And it’s like, man, what’s going on here?
So now I don’t have a church because I’m not going to churches.
Every week I try to find a new church, but I go in there and I just feel a coldness.
And sometimes I can see people griming me.
You don’t even know me.
Why are you being this way?
And this is how things work.
And I just said, what’s wrong with the church?
And so I stopped going and I started blogging about it.
And that blog became a ministry where I started to teach the Bible and have sermons and all that type of stuff.
And I went back to the Orthodox Bible views and I taught those.
And the core of everything is love.
And I taught love and I said, this is the foundation.
We got to love one another.
We can’t be this way towards one another.
We need to be pleasing to God, which is where the whole ministry or the website name came from, let’s please God, because we’re not currently pleasing God.
As I thought back then when I was a Christian.
And so I was encouraging believers to please God.
And so I got a lot of followers at the time.
I had a large email following, this is not that big now, but back then it was.
I mean, I had about 500 or so followers and people that were listening on a regular basis, some support here and there and a lot of encouragement that, hey, what you’re saying is right.
I don’t go to church because of the same reasons, Neil.
I wish we would love one another, etc, etc.
I used to think that the church had some bad apples in it.
But as I studied the Scriptures, I realized that there’s actually a good church and a bad church.
There’s a dead church which is going to h***.
They’ve completely changed the gospel.
They’ve altered the Scriptures to support their lifestyles and whatever sin they wanted to commit.
And then you have the remnant of Christians, the remnant of Christians who have left the church because they don’t want to fellowship with such people.
And they’re living in small clusters here and there, going to home Bible churches and stuff like that, instead of going to these mainstream big churches.
So I started following these groups and I would go listen to their sermons.
They would have zoom calls.
They weren’t called that back then, but you could get online and see people preaching in their houses and chat with them and things like that.
And I started to see the same stuff that I’ve seen in mainstream churches and it’s like, what’s going on?
Why can’t we be Christians?
And that’s why I’m going to talk about in my next broadcast, because why so much hypocrisy?
It’s a big deal.
It’s a reason for that.
But anyway, I’m thinking to myself, okay, the church is completely good.
It’s just some bad apples.
Now there’s a good church and a bad church.
And there’s a passage in the Bible that talks about, few will find the road that leads to life, but broad is the road that leads to destruction.
And so there’s a lot of scriptures that talk about a lot of people, even Christians going to h***.
There’s a passage that talks about people coming up to Jesus on the day of judgment and saying, lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name and cast our demons in your name and let us into heaven?
He’s like, Get away from me, you worker of iniquity.
I never knew you.
So he’s essentially saying, look, you’re saying all these things in my name, but you live a life of sin.
And I would read that passage, and then I would look at the congregation in the church and say, why are you people doing this?
Why are you living in sin?
Don’t you know that this is going to cause you a place in h***?
Like you’re not going to end up in heaven?
It says another pastor, do not be deceived fornicators nor adulterers.
They go down a list of all these sins and behaviors.
They say they will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Yet you have a pastor teaching people where you want save, always save.
So that passage doesn’t even matter to you.
And I’m just looking at heresy, over, in heresy.
And I was able to defend my faith against a lot of pastors.
I always beat them because the Bible clearly states what it says.
And I just couldn’t deal with the hypocrisy and heresy.
But I still felt like I was part of the remnant, that there were scattered fewer people across the world and maybe a couple of thousand, maybe, I don’t know.
And I felt like, okay, well, this is what we got to do.
We just got to keep studying this Bible.
We got to keep following the Lord and we’ll make it into heaven.
And so all the way up until that last sermon that I finished in that series called Sex and Family is when I started to think for myself and say, you know what?
The whole thing is bullshit.
This Bible is Plagiarized.
This Bible has been fabricated.
This ain’t the word of God.
There’s a bunch of men that wrote this.
And this has been causing me a lot of suffering in my life.
So that’s how I left the church.
It was a gradual process, but I got so many stories to tell, and I’ll be sharing them throughout this broadcast.
But it’s just waves of like, man, nobody loves each other, hypocrisy, heresy.
The church is corrupted.
Now the church is actually two types of churches.
There’s the Harley Church, and then there’s the remnant of Christians that are scattered throughout the world.
That’s the true church.
That’s the remnant.
And then eventually the whole thing is bullshit.
So that’s how I left.
That’s why I left Christian Christianity.
And I have no intention of going back.
I’ve had people try to shame me back.
I know the truth.
The Bible is bullshit.
Okay?
Now let me say this about the Bible before I go finish this up.
I respect the Bible.
There’s good things in the Bible.
Originally, the Bible was supposed to be an allegorical book, not a literal book.
There wasn’t supposed to be people believing in a literal snake and two naked people in the garden, okay?
Or a character named Jesus walking on water and feeding 5000.
All of this was supposed to be allegories, but somehow it became something to teach the people, literally.
And to this day.
There is no proof of Jesus’s existence.
There’s no proof of it.
You can’t find it.
And the narrative of how Christianity spread to the world is absolute bullshit.
If you do actual research, you’ll find that Christianity got spread across the world with a sword to people’s necks.
Basically, they pull up in your country and they say, look, you’re going to accept Jesus, Lord and Savor, this is the way, and you’re going to follow this or we’re going to kill you.
And there are people who refuse and they end up getting burned at the stake.
So religion, particularly Christianity, was forced on people.
It wasn’t the narrative that the Bible gives you.
Where Jesus came out of the Israelites, he was a Hebrew.
Then he realized he was the Son of God.
Then he started preaching this gospel of salvation.
That message got spread through his apostles and then the Catholic Church kind of made it popular.
No, everybody’s a Christian today because at some point somebody got a sword put to their neck.
That’s it.
That’s it.
That’s how we got started.
Okay?
So if you call yourself a Christian, your Christianity comes from swords to people’s necks.
That’s why I got there, okay?
There’s nothing good in this thing.
It’s a man made book and we’ll expose all that in the future broadcast.
But that’s how I left religion.
I hope that helps you understand where I’m coming from.
Stay tuned for the next broadcast.
Until then, be happy.
Be whole.
If you want to be happy, stop doing stuff you don’t want to do.
Subscribe comment rate and be blessed.
Have a good rest of your day.
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