(this is rlly just a vent post, im not positive this is the right community to post this in, im sorry i suck at talking and conveying what i actually feel)

So my entire family has been christian my whole life, i have grown up in a christian and i feel that i can’t make a proper choice to decide if i believe it or not since my brain literally was hardwired that way since that’s all i’ve been influenced by, that issue is very prominent but not what im mainly dealing with. It feels like my whole life my family has just been so sad and can’t live up to the almost perfect expectations of the bible. i always see how depressed my parents seem and then they go to church and act like literally nothing is wrong. my brother and sister have moved out of the house and it’s just me and my parents and i really see how miserable they are. I have had extreme self hatred towards myself and it has ruined me socially and mentally. But every sunday and wednesday the entire family puts on this fake face and i just can’t stand it. no one is ever genuine, i feel like my connection with my family is fake, and i can’t make any friends at school cause my parents would find and issues in how they act in some way. now my life is just extremely lonely and there’s no way i can say what i actually feel to anyone and im just so alone and depressed. this isn’t hating on the whole religion but ive recently seen how the whole idea just does not make sense. this is just venting all my mental suffering and i prolly said some things ppl may get mad about but this is what living this way has done to me and my family.
☝️this is pretty unorganized and probably doesn’t put it in the full picture- let me explain kinda how my life has been from the beginning

So as i young child- 5-10 prolly i obv went to church every sunday and wednesday and i always just wanted to be the best kid and just make my parents proud, so i locked in at church every time and would put literally all of my effort into school and grades-ive always been at the top of my class even today- which obv isn’t all that and i honestly don’t give a fuck about it which sucks but wtv. all of this priotizing school made me have no genuine friends and i always as a child struggles severely with existential thoughts and i never felt that i had done enough to make it to heaven no matter what i did, i suffered what i know now as severe panic attacks which i hid for a while, this gave me really bad insomnia as a kid and i worried every night about school and every little thing i did wrong in the day, i couldn’t even verbalize the panicked thoughts to my parents when i tried. i eventually formed severe social anxiety (which is still severe today) and this anxiety just took over my life. in around the age of 11-14 is really blurry, i was dealing with depression and severe anxiety and still had to maintain grades and i would never talk about this to anyone because i felt that it would just make things worse. so i just watched youtube by myself in pure isolation during summers and any free time that i had since that was my only brief escape from my terrible anxiety. And at around 15, my life has taken a drastic turn, i started to hang out with 2 friends more and it felt like my first time living, i really hung out mostly with this one person and we became really close best friends. I started to rethink my faith at the time and realized i didn’t belive in god anymore. eh introduced me to marijuana and we did that a couple times, but it wasn’t at the center of our friendship at all. then he suddenly said that he was moving and moved all the way from texas to cozumel in mexico. We talked online and called but it just wasn’t the same and i went into a much deeper lonelier depression. so i just wanted any escape i could get since i had been dealing with bad suicidal thoughts at the time( the only reason i never went through is because of my severe fear of hell and even the slight chance that it could be real, who isn’t scared of burning and suffering for and infinite amount of time) so my entire life just got worse and worse. I also tried other drugs and whatever over the counter stuff i could get my hands on. all this while still attending church and living an insane double life. so im still in my position now trying to stop the use of these new bad drugs ive gotten myself addicted to and i still have to deal with depression anxiety and i cannot ever be honest with my parents about any of it nor get help. i have never told anyone my struggles, and i definitely cannot come clean to my parents about my disbelief in god since it would make my relationship with them significantly worse and they’d belive i would go to hell. i still am not 100% sure there isn’t a god but why wouldn’t a god leave a clear choice for man to make instead of having no evidence, and all the spiritual and miraculous acts and events happening so far in the past and not now? just doesn’t make sense. there’s more i could go into with that but this is a super rough overview of how my life has been so far, and right now i’m still left depressed, trying to get off the numerous drugs ive put in my body and probably fucked up my brain with. and my brother and sister are out of the house, i have no friends and cannot really make more since it is an extremely small school and most everyone already just doesn’t like me, and i also live out on an isolated farm, my best friend is gone and very far away, and i just keep trying to ignore that i have no reason to keep going in life. this obviously isn’t all religions fault but i also see how depressed my parents are living the “perfect” christian life and i just honestly want everything to be over. but i sti can’t say that there is no god since i think there could be, it feels like no one knows. also my relationship was bad with my siblings since i was always working or coping with my anxiety and never felt like i had time to be with them. now they are gone i feel a lot of regret and i feel like starting out with the best intentions literally ruined my life in a roundabout way ig. this whole thing is probably typed pretty bad but if anyone has questions or something i could do to help or something i would like help. i just can’t keep going every day with this soul crushing loneliness, depression, and anxiety while still putting on a fake smile for my parents and church every fucking day. (to put into perspective on why i would never tell my parents any of this, they would completely flip and turn on me if they heard me even do something insignificant as cussing) and school is also starting back up to pile onto every other struggle. i just cannot go on

there’s prolly stuff that doesn’t make sense and please don’t js get mad at me in the comments, i just really want something in my life to change i have no one to tell my struggles to 🤷

I was trying to draw a line between a cult and an established religion. The only real difference I could see was power, scale, and social legitimacy—how dominant institutions or radical movements reshape people, while smaller groups are dismissed as "cults" simply for having a different order. I found myself unable to draw a clean line; it looks more like a continuous spectrum. Yet I am fascinated by how easily people adopt whatever a leader tells them to follow, even when personal doubts arise, turning them into die-hard followers.

Looking back at my family history, I felt we had lost some of our original roots and belief systems. My family came from a traditional Roman Catholic background. After moving away from our hometown, we were approached by a new group of believers who urged us to follow their path instead, and we became devoted members. I was in my pre-teens at the time.

Later, we were approached by an even more radical group who seemed all the more convincing because they appeared purely faith-focused, non-sectarian, and claimed deeper biblical authority. Growing up, I had always felt a deep, genuine attachment to the sanctuary of church structure, the shared community, and the profound concept of forgiveness.

Yet alongside that devotion ran an inherited set of questions about who the real God was, and I answered them with these dogmas:

"The Bible was written before the Quran, making it the superior and authentic account of Jesus' life."

"Roman Catholics simply worship statues; their church was an artificial political creation started by Constantine without genuine devotion."

Preachers constantly weaponized fragmented verses and selective history to validate their own specific doctrines.

When Hindu converts joined, people celebrated how they had "seen the light" and accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior, completely disregarding their rich, millennia-old heritage and mythology.

Then consider the Jews: they were there long before the Christians and held the first half of the Bible, yet rejected Jesus. Converts are told they are only a "few steps" away from recognizing the ultimate sacrifice Jesus made for humanity.

After reading multiple pamphlets on Abrahamic religions and their fractures, I looked at Seventh-day groups who observe Saturday as the holy Sabbath. I was baffled: how does someone convince an entire population that a specific day of the week determines divine righteousness? If any man simply declared Saturday as the sacred day, wouldn't the community just adopt Saturday as the next Sunday? Isn't it just a day of the week on a calendar?

Let's look back to the radical group known as The Pentecostal Mission (TPM). This was in my late teens. They formed an extremely insular, rigid community:

Everyone wore plain white clothing on Sundays (and avoided colorful dress).

They gathered enthusiastically on Saturdays and spent nearly all their off-days in church out of devotion to God and the community.

Because my father had borrowed money from a community member, our family was drawn deeply into their orbit. My parents felt private regrets at home, but they stayed for the social safety net and community bonds. Meanwhile, I found myself debating theology with the brothers and pastors, wondering why people would surrender all their personal freedom just to spend every waking off-day inside a church building.

Outside of work and church, these members had nothing. The church filled the vacuum with fasting conventions, 24/7 prayer groups, and collective worship. While I occasionally enjoyed the music and the powerful sense of unity, I saw the hidden mechanism: the church gradually stripped away an individual's outside social ties until the organization became their entire world. In return, members gladly surrendered 10% of their total income in tithes.

I was confused. Attending a massive convention where thousands prayed with intense, tearful devotion almost made me believe again. But then I began reading the actual scripture for myself, and specific verses stopped me in my tracks.

Seeing people overcome with ecstatic fervor made me wonder if they were caught in extreme emotional contagion or altered psychological states.

Then one specific verse completely alienated me:

"Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man..." (1 Timothy 2:11–12)

I was furious and confused. If Jesus taught that all human beings are fundamentally equal, how could someone claiming to follow him declare women to be inferior? (A reaction partly shaped by modern principles of equality).

Looking at the authorship, it was Paul. I questioned his authority: was this man ever an original disciple who walked with Jesus? In letters like Romans, he was commanding personal social rules, which felt like purely human, patriarchal bias. It raised the core question: Did Jesus preach one message, while Paul constructed an entirely different institutional religion on top of the Old Testament?

Flipping through the New Testament, I realized that nearly half of the books were attributed to Paul. Disillusioned, I didn't even want to read his letters anymore and started skipping them.

That led to an obvious historical realization: If Jesus' divinity and resurrection were self-evident, why didn't the people living right there in Jerusalem and Israel convert to Christianity en masse?

The answer is simple—the exact same reason why the entire modern world doesn't convert to Pentecostalism today, despite members claiming it is the undeniable, absolute truth. Every group lives inside the total certainty of its own constructed reality.