The deeper I stepped into adulthood, the more I saw religion for what it truly was in my environment: a cage. A cage made not of iron, but of words. Not of chains, but of fear.
When I was younger, I thought religion was freedom. That was what they told us that Jesus came to set us free, that the church was where we found peace, that faith was the key to joy. But the reality I lived was different. Instead of freedom, I felt trapped. Instead of joy, I felt guilt. Instead of peace, I felt constant fear.
Religion, as I knew it, was not setting people free. It was holding them hostage.
It became obvious in church gatherings. The sermons followed a predictable pattern:
Remind the people of hell.
Remind them they are never good enough.
Tell them they need to do more pray more, fast more, give more.
Remind them of curses waiting if they disobey.
Finally, open the offering basket and ask them to sow seeds for "breakthrough."
It was like watching a play you've seen a thousand times. The audience never changed, the actors never changed, only the size of the offering grew bigger.
I began to notice the language too. Pastors spoke with authority as if they alone had the hotline to God. They positioned themselves as middlemen, interpreters of divine mysteries. Without them, you were blind, lost, and doomed. And because people feared being lost, they clung to pastors the way a drowning man clings to driftwood.
Fear was the cage. Fear of hell. Fear of curses. Fear of offending the man of God. Fear of being labeled rebellious. And with that fear, people were easy to control.
I can't count the number of times I saw poor widows give their last coins to the church, while the pastor drove home in a car worth more than the widow's entire house. I saw struggling men donate money they didn't have, because they were told "God loves a cheerful giver" and that if they didn't give, their blessings would be blocked.
I remember one Sunday in particular. The pastor preached about Abraham sacrificing Isaac and told us we too must prove our faith by giving "our Isaacs." He didn't mean our children of course not. He meant our money. He meant our possessions. He meant the very little we had left. People cried, people rushed to the altar, people dropped money they couldn't afford. And yet, I knew some of them would go home to empty pots and hungry children.
I sat there, watching, and something inside me broke. How could this be of God? How could a loving Father take joy in watching His children starve so they could feed a pastor's lifestyle?
The truth was bitter: religion had become a business. A carefully crafted system of profit, where guilt was the advertisement, fear was the sales pitch, and hope was the product being sold.
What made it worse was the hypocrisy. Many of these pastors preached against worldliness, yet they lived more extravagantly than the very celebrities they condemned. They raised funds "for the work of God," but much of it went into private ventures schools, businesses, estates. On paper, those ventures were noble, but in practice, they excluded the very people who had funded them.
The poor who sacrificed everything could not afford the schools. They could not rent the houses. They could not access the businesses. They had given, but they remained excluded.
I often asked myself: If Jesus Himself built schools and hospitals, would He lock the doors against the poor? Would He demand school fees from widows whose coins He had blessed in the temple? The answer was clear no. But that wasn't the Christianity I saw around me.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this cage of religion was not accidental. It was designed. Those who held the cage knew exactly what they were doing. They understood that as long as people were afraid of hell, they would never stop giving, never stop obeying, never stop surrendering their freedom.
And I began to see that the cage was not just in the church it was in society at large. Religion had become a tool of governance. It kept the masses docile. It made them accept poverty as "God's will." It made them see suffering as "a test of faith." It made them wait for heaven while others enjoyed earth.
I realized then that the hell we feared might not even exist in flames beneath the earth. Hell was here. Hell was hunger. Hell was ignorance. Hell was poverty. Hell was watching your children cry for food while your pastor's children studied abroad. Hell was the mental slavery that kept you from questioning because you were too scared of blasphemy.
Religion, the way I knew it, was not freedom. It was bondage.
And that was when I made another vow to myself: if I was ever going to find God, it would not be in the cage they built for me. It would be outside it, in the open field of truth.
I am not sure christain anymore, I am a believer. I forsake religion I embrace spirituality.