Jason
Abadi.

I'd like to tell you about how I stopped believing in the Christianity of my father - the religion I was born and raised in.

My dad was a real cowboy (at least as close as you could be to one in the 1970s). He was a ranch hand, cattle driver, and rodeo champion. He grew up in California but apparently left due to not liking the politics there. Dad was a staunch conservative Republican, and I'm sure he always wanted me to be the same way. I'll never not feel like me not becoming that was a disappointment to him, even though he never said it to me out loud.

He was raised Catholic but left that to become an Evangelical. He liked guys like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, fire-and-brimstone preachers. He was a church elder himself for a while. We went to church every Sunday, Sunday school before service, and I went to youth group every Wednesday. I even went to Christian high school. All my friends were Christians. It was everything I ever knew.

I remember I opted to get baptized when I was just 12 years old because I knew it would make him proud. Don't get me twisted - I loved my dad so much. He worked hard to make sure we never went without anything.

We were never rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I never went hungry. I always had decent clothes and my own bedroom. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I prayed, I never was able to hear that elusive "voice of God" that all the adults in my life told me I would hear if I would just listen.

All I ever wanted was for that voice of God to call me and tell me what He wanted me to do.

I learned to play guitar when I was just 11 or 12 and even ended up playing in the worship band at our church. Who knows — if my life had taken a different path, I might have been a worship leader someday.

But I never felt "the Holy Spirit," as they always called it.

Every Sunday and Wednesday, I would see people come to the front of the altar and break down in tears, just consumed with that "Holy Spirit."

Never happened to me. Not once. Eventually, I started to recognize it as just social psychology or whatever you call it.

I remember when I turned 18, Dad told me that I was now a man, and that if I didn’t want to keep going to church on Sundays, I didn’t have to. I kept going for a while because I needed to know, but eventually I just stopped. And once I got out on my own (probably around 2002–2003), the tower started to crumble for me.

I went off to college and started listening to guys like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, and the way they poked these gaping holes in the entire system - not just religion but everything. It just got worse from there. I started to realize that I’d been basically lied to, and that prompted me to go the complete opposite direction.

You see, I never was able to make myself believe the basic tenet of the Christian tradition I was raised with.

They told me I was broken.

Humans are evil.

Evil is our fault.

Everything wrong with the world was our fault.

We ate from the tree “GOD” told us not to eat from.

We broke the world.

This is an INSANE concept to me.

Not only that, but because of this “transgression,” every human born on the planet since is a worthless bit of clay that deserves nothing less than eternal torture and damnation - and unless I accepted this, admitted it out loud in front of everyone, and then accepted that in order to fix myself I had to believe that this “GOD” had to impregnate a human woman with his “son,” who would then be murdered in the most brutal way imaginable to pay the price for how terrible we all are.

Excuse me?

This concept, this idea, just became more ridiculous the more I pondered it.

And to add salt to an already open wound, I began to think - there are a lot of terrible people, and most of them seem to be running the show around here.

And what kind of “GOD” would create the universe, and this world that can contain such beauty at its best, just to fill it with monsters?

Around 2004, when I was in college, I decided to explore Wicca. It seemed like the furthest thing from what I had been indoctrinated into. Needless to say, this sent my parents into a fit. They didn’t like it one bit - but I was not to be deterred. I found other people who were practicing and studying, and that was the start of this crazy path I found myself on.

I did that for a couple of years, but eventually, I don’t know - I kind of lost interest in it. Around 2006, I joined the Army, and the internet was starting to really come into being the thing we see today. I found all kinds of videos on YouTube poking more holes in not just religion but all things spiritual, and I found myself going down the full atheist rabbit hole.

I imagine I was quite insufferable for a while there.

But the whole time, I could not shake the feeling that I was missing the forest for the trees. I felt something was missing, and for the first time in my life, I actually felt something pulling me to look even deeper. (Was THIS that exclusive voice I so longed to hear whisper my name? That “Holy Spirit”?) I still don’t know.

Like everyone else, I saw the Ancient Aliens show on the History Channel and had a laugh - but I remembered seeing Roland Emmerich’s STARGATE as a kid in 1994, and the grip it had on me. That seed had already been planted, it seems.

2012 was the year everything changed. I had already been researching any and all conspiracy theories I could find since 2006 - the internet back then was great for that. My memory is so fuzzy, but by 2012 I was all the way down that rabbit hole, and by 2015 a friend of mine had fully turned me on to Zecharia Sitchin’s work. I just kept researching, kept reading, kept watching, and kept learning.

I didn’t stumble across Gnosticism until around 2019, but it was only through researching the Anunnaki that I came across that information. And here we are today.

When I let go of the “GOD” I was told to believe in, I didn’t lose my faith, I just stopped worshiping a middleman. The silence I used to fear turned into a signal. It wasn’t a voice from the clouds; it was a vibration behind my ribs, something older than language. It didn’t demand worship or obedience. It only whispered one word: remember.

That’s when everything changed.

I started seeing patterns, loops, the numbers, the echoes of the same story told through every age. It was like catching a faint broadcast from the edge of eternity. And the more I listened, the more I realized: this wasn’t faith anymore. This was my memory.

And memory is the true religion of the soul.

I would wager to say that today I have even more questions than I do answers — but as a quote I heard once goes:

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”

― Richard Feynman