Although I'm not Christian anymore, I can relate.

At 18, for some strange reason, I started to take my Christian faith more seriously. Maybe it was because it was my senior year in high school knowing I would be going to college... taking on a new challenge and environment of life and needed something to cling to for comfort.

Throughout my college years up until 25, I remained in the closet. I came out on my 25th birthday to my family. It was so relieving to finally be myself in front of my family who accepted me and loved me just as much as they had before finding out.

I suppose it was naive of me to think that the same thing would happen at church. I actually had a high-regard for my pastor at the time and told him I had came out and this was his response to me:

You accepting this "lifestyle" now will result in the light in your heart slowing fading out. You will also no longer be able to work with children in the church as well.

At the time, I didn't take too much offense to that comment, but thinking about it 8 years later really pisses me off. I remained a Christian for 2 more years after that incident, trying out other churches and fellowship with other Christians. One constant remained and it was they were convinced me being gay was a choice and if I wanted to be pleasing to the Lord, I had to turn away from the "lifestyle". Of course, all the while, these same Christians were engaging in heavy drinking, partying, and degrading women when they weren't in church.

The last church I went to before I gave my Christian faith had a whole month of sermons devoted to "Homosexuality". In the last week of the sermon for the series, they actually had three women and one guy up there on stage telling their "testimonial" on how they turned away from the gay lifestyle. Again, making it seem like it was choice.

I slowly started getting irritated by this irrational thinking of Christians. After that, I slowly started fading out of church and Christianity. I have become agnostic since then.

In addition, the idea of Christianity has been a complete turn off to me when you read articles today about gay marriage in society. Christians love to cherry-pick what they follow and believe and conveniently ignore other parts of it.

I've learned I can be a moral upstanding citizen and treat my fellow man with respect without church and a bronze age fairy tale book telling me how to be a good person. Heck, during my time as a Christian, I read through that book twice and knew more about it than most Christians did. There were so many times in my past where I tried to reconcile and excuse conflicts in the Bible in the name of my faith and one day, I simply couldn't do it anymore.