The true story of a conservative Christian Pastor who began to question the religious dogmas of his youth and the changes which came as a result of his questioning. Also included is an examination of many Christian doctrines and the problems the author developed with those doctrines.

The doctrine of sin creates a terrible self-hatred of our humanity. Sin tells me that I can’t make mistakes; therefore, my wife cannot make mistakes, either. Nor can my kids, my friends, or my pastors at my churches. In fact, nobody can make mistakes, and yet, we all do. Because of our views about sin, we set ourselves and everyone else around us up for constant failure. We will all metaphorically (or literally) poop our pants at some point. This belief that anything short of perfection is sin makes us feel worthless when we fail and betrayed when others fail. After I had begun writing this chapter, I read an article by Gary Pence about sin; he writes about the pressures that needing everything around us to be perfect and sin-free can cause: Once we recognize the irrationality of our own perfectionist expectations and the rage and despair that they induce in us, we can see that those biblical passages which portray a God injured, insulted, betrayed, and diminished by human disregard and disloyalty in fact represent our own human projection onto God of our despair about our own imperfection and our rage at the imperfections of others and the world we share. Instead of feeling so much self-hatred and rage and even projecting those feelings upon God, perhaps we should stop expecting ourselves and everyone else to be perfect. Maybe we should embrace our humanity and our imperfection and realize that we all have “accidents” at times. Maybe instead of labeling every mistake we make as sin (and some of the things we are taught are sin shouldn’t even be seen as “sin” in my opinion, but more on that in awhile), we should just see our mistakes as mistakes and move on. Do we really need to have penance for our humanity? Do we really need to beg God’s forgiveness for not being perfect? Do we really want to? How can we ever be happy if we take this approach to life? Forgive yourself. Love yourself. Don’t expect perfection from yourself. Don’t expect it from others.

Brent McCay spent thirteen years working as a pastor. He is now in the midst of a career change, because he no longer has the answers needed to be a pastor. Brent is currently going back to school to become a Physical Therapist. Brent is a husband and father to three great kids.