The Manic Candice Podcast
Why I Left The Christian Church
(upbeat music) - Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the Manic Candice podcast. As you go Candice, back at it again with a brand new episode of the podcast. And today this morning, this evening, this afternoon, this good night, we're going to discuss why I love the Christian church. I know, shocking. Candice doesn't believe in Jesus anymore. That's not the church. I have left the church. I have not left my faith. I want to talk about my experience growing up in the church 'cause not everyone grew up in a church. And I realized that once I grew up trying to share the gospel of Jesus, trying to share the gospel of Jesus to anyone who could listen and they would look at me like I was retarded. And that's not the reason why I left. I'm not ashamed of my faith in Jesus. I'm just ashamed of the practices of the Christian church. All of the Christian churches, the Catholic church, the Mormon church, the non-denominational church, which is a denomination in and of itself, I grew up in a non-denominational church and it was all about money. And I'll talk all about why I left Christianity bullet point by bullet point. So like I said, although I love the Christian church, I didn't lose my faith in Jesus Christ. There have been many, many supernatural events in my life where I encountered Jesus, which were I thought I encountered Jesus. So in my mind, I encountered Jesus. So just let me have that. If you think I'm crazy, if you think I'm stupid, if you think I'm laughing, then if you think, if you're laughing because of what I said, that's okay with me. I was just sexy red came out with a new song. They don't lie, they ain't jamming shit. They ain't got some dick. Yeah, my accent. It's cookie wet, baby. You ain't gotta get no spit. I've heard you say it since I prayed. I've been a bitch. You got a girl, boy, it's cool. I'm telling shit. We go together now, I'm lying. Give me a kiss. You just know I'm hella sexy. Here we are talking about a subject about Christianity and then we put on sexy red. No panties on with something dressed. If she tatted on the chest, go out in my purse and I'll post it on the set. You might really take me a nigga where your geeks ate. Niggas said they jamming lines, they ain't jamming shit. Niggas said they're jamming lines, they ain't jamming shit. Okay. So disclaimer, I'm not here to offend anybody if you're a Christian. I'm not here to bring you against Christianity. I'm not here to do any of that. I'm not here to sway your faith. I'm not here to talk shit about the Christian church. I'm not here to talk shit about Jesus Christ or God. I'm just here to talk about why I left the church itself. Have you been to a Christian church in the last 15 years? So let me explain Christianity. Christianity is a religion where they follow a text, supposedly, they follow a text called the Bible. And inside the Bible, there are rules and regulations of how to product yourself and your life and how to treat other people. Christians don't live up to those standards. And I knew that based off the way certain people would call themselves Christians, like certain bad people. And I would just be like, okay, you're a Christian? It would just confuse me. It'd be people like people who've done you wrong, people who've betrayed you. Like, for example, I have this woman in my life. She portrayed me at my lowest point, recorded my whole mental breakdown. And then in her bio, it says, God first. Um, okay. It's just the hypocrisy of the followers that I cannot stand. Um, I'm no different. Like, I'll go to church and then I'll smoke weed all day. I mean, the thing about Christianity is that the reason for Christ is that we're not perfect. But I see that as a cop out, like, oh, I'm just going to, I'm just going to do whatever I want. Jesus died for me. No, you have to put an effort to be a good person. So Christianity is more than just following this book. There's a bunch of rules. Like, you can't have sex before marriage. You can't be gay. Um, any sexual devianty outside of a marriage, any sex outside of a marriage is considered deviant. But there's people, they don't live up to that. The people who are preaching it, the people in the congregation, the congregation is the church. They don't live up to that. And like, they misinterpret the Bible to fit their own needs. Like at the end of the Bible, did you know that Jesus has a bride? Did you know Jesus has a whole bride that he's coming back for? He's not coming back for us. He's coming back for his bride. And he probably already came back for his bride. But no one in the church wants to accept that. And everyone in the church is saying, no, we're all Jesus's bride. Where does that make sense in any context? Like, oh, we're the body of Christ. We're the body of Christ. Like, no, you're not. The body of Christ is the body of Christ, and his church is his wife. Did you know that Mary Magdalene, let's get into Mary Magdalene. The church denies Mary Magdalene, which was Christ's lover. The girl that washed his feet in perfume, that's his lover. And he came back for her. And she's the first witness of him coming back, supposedly. And they just erased her from Christianity. I'm sorry, she's like the most important part of Christianity. The Christian church, it makes me feel embarrassed for being a believer in Christ, because everyone in the church doesn't live up to Christ morals. Christ's moral was to love your neighbor as you love yourself. When's the last time you show love to your neighbor as you'd love yourself? When's the last time you showed hatred? When's the last time you got online and said, "Fuck you." Or, like, snared at someone that you don't like? When's the last time you stalk someone? So we don't love each other like he's commanded to. Another big thing that I have against the church is tithing. Now, what tithing is, is that it's a sneaky little scripture in the Bible that says you have to donate 10% of all your earnings to the church. Listen, I believe that that scripture was inserted by King James himself. That's just my radical belief. I'll take it to the bank, but like, why are you asking poor people? Why are you asking all kinds of people for money, for 10% of their money? Like, if a person who makes $30,000 is going to give them $3,000 a year, and the churches, they promise blessings. They're like, "God is going to bless you. God is going to bless you so much. If you give your money to us, if you just give your money to us, God is going to bless you." What does that money use for? I know, personally, my pastor took vacations every four months to Hawaii. Every four fucking months, and then he would adopt children. That's not cheap. That's not cheap at all. And like the church I went to, we started off as a small church. And then they started a campaign called He Is Able, where they asked all of us to donate pennies and pennies and pennies and pennies every Sunday on top of our timings. And then they built a mega church with our money. They spent like $6 million to build it. And like they have not made a dent in homelessness. They have not cured hunger. I mean, that's just one church, and they have millions of dollars. I went to work at Vanguard, and I saw the Jewish churches. They have billions of dollars, but they keep it within themselves. They don't like to help outside people that are not Jews. Another thing that I don't like about the Christian church is colonization. I'm Native American. 400, 500 years ago, our land was colonized and instead that our practices were witchcraft, our ceremonies were witchcraft, and they made us abandon our ceremonies. They made us system elite. They made us chop our hair. They made us converted to Christianity. They made us wear clothes that they wore. So there's a lot of customs, and there's a lot of folklore that are missing from my culture because of white colonization, because of white Christian colonization. And every time I went into church, I felt out of place because I'm Navajo and because I'm Black, because of what the church has done to my people. How many, like, I wish I could retrace my ancestry to see what type of religion I was practicing. Maybe it would make sense to me. It's no longer religion. It's no longer a solution for me to pacify my questions in life. I have a lot of questions in life that can't be answered in the Bible. Like, what happens after we die? What happens before we die? Where were we before we die? Where are the dinosaurs? Where are the Native Americans? Where are the Black people? All I see is an erasure of a bunch of different cultures and a bunch of white people and a creation story that in a thousand years, you guys, if they keep the Bible, they're going to wipe out. There's already creation stories saying that the Neanderthals created the earth, created everything, created America. That's not true. It was indigenous populations that were here and created the eastern hemisphere from Australia, not Australia, from Canada, down to South America. It was completely colonized by Christian churches. We were told that we were evil, and, like, there's so many traditions from western Europe, from western, like, Asian, Polynesian, Hawaiian, there's so many cultures that were wiped out because of colonization, because of the stupid Christian church. And there's so much arrogance in the Christian church. There's this concept of saving people where you have to pick someone who's not saved, who doesn't believe in Jesus, and you have to save them. It's this whole ordeal where it's like you have to accept Christ in your life. You have to confess your sins. You have to confess that Jesus is Lord, and then you're saved. Is that it? Where does it say that in the Bible? I would want to know, like, this is how you get saved from hell. I don't know how you get saved from hell. I don't know how you're supposed to do that. And if there is a god, I think he would judge people based on their heart and based on their actions here on earth, especially based on their heart. I think that's what he's concerned about, and there are scriptures in the Bible that specifically say he's concerned about the matters of your heart. It doesn't mean do bad things, but we can't help to do bad things as people. That's something that church has taught me. One thing I can't stand about the Christian church is that there's many different versions of the Bible. We have the non-denominational Bible. We have the Mormon church, which has an extra book called the Book of Mormon. We have Baptist, but we have a King James Bible. We have a new version, study version. We have all types of version, and each version, each scripture gets changed a little bit. It gets modified a little bit, so it means something different. Like, Lucifer and Jesus means the same thing in one of the new translations. It's just really bad, and gay people, and the hypocrisy was gay people. Do we let them in the church do we not? Are they welcome in the church, or are they not? Let me tell you something about gay people and the church. They're not welcome. They never were welcome, and they never will be welcome. The church is very homophobic, all of them. All of them. I know from experience. I tried coming out to my church, and one church, the church that I went to was called Vineyard North Phoenix, and I tried coming out to them, and they immediately formed a prayer circle to me and further gain it as to come out of me. In the Catholic church, there's something called the Pope, where he's like the closest contact to God. I don't believe in that. I don't believe that there's one person that's close contact to God. That just gives a message that you can't talk to God, that only the Pope can, and that the Catholic church encourages prayers to saints. The Bible says that you can't pray to the dead because they can't be seen. [Music] Woman taken by the wind, would you stay if she promised you heaven, were you ever with? She's like a kid in the dark, and then she is the darkness. She's lost her life like a perci-lineman. She's had silence. Well in love you never see the woman. Taken by the wind, uh. I believe that, well I feel that the church has abused its power over its believer's vulnerability and believing in God. At the end of the session, at the end of the sermon, my pastor would be like if you need prayer for this, if you need prayer for that, and like the church members would pray for people who had ailments, or had cancer, who had financial problems, and then it's like you're going up to the congregation, you're telling everyone your secrets and they're like praying over you, and I'm just like why are you telling people your secrets? I know it's important to have people pay over you, but it's like I thought it was just weird. I felt unconnected. I finally understand what people say when they just feel weird when they're in church. Since I became a more spiritual person, I feel judged going into the church. Not because of my tattoos as I cover my tattoos, but it's just like I have this aura around me that like I practice the occult. I don't practice the occult. I study the occult. I study things like tarot cards. I study things like books about witches and books about magic and things like that, which is a huge no-no in the church when the Bible is all about magic and miracles and things like that. The Catholic Church has conducted child rape and molestation, and we're just going to ignore that as a church. The Jewish Church has been confused of child molestation. The Muslim Church, not the Muslim Church, but certain Muslim leaders have been accused of having pedophile boys in the Iraq war, and we just didn't do anything about it. There's always a mix of pedophilia in all religions, and one thing I don't understand about the Abrahamic religions, which is the Judaism, Muslim, I mean Islam, and Christianity, is they all disagree when it comes to Jesus. The Jews don't think he's a God. The Christians believe that he is God, and the Muslims believe he's a prophet. So they all disagree. Churches don't pay taxes to kind of add insult to injury. They don't pay taxes. They have a clearing called 5103C or 5301C clearing in their taxes. So all that typing, all that giving, all that we need your money to build this, we need your money to do that. It's bullshit. They don't need your money. They need money for investments. I've seen it. I've seen it. I've seen it, especially with Jewish churches. They have so much money. Their institutions go back hundreds of years, and they have billions of dollars just waiting in hedge funds. I worked at Vanguard. I've seen these accounts, you guys, like they have so much money. And like LA's homeless population isn't the 60,000. Another thing I don't like about the church is that they ignore scripture. Love thy neighbor as he loved thyself, ignored. They like to bring up scripture that is from the Old Testament. You see, Jesus died so that the Old Testament no longer applies to us. So the Old Testament is about sacrifices of animals and people as about rape of children and rape of women and war and conquest. But they talk about how a man shall not lie with another man as he does a woman. It's like Leviticus, something, something, something, something, something. If Leviticus happens to be in the New Testament, then fuck what I said. I believe it's in the Old Testament. Hold on. Yes, the Leviticus is in the Old Testament. It's known as the Third Book of Moses. And like what I don't understand is that Judas and follows the first five books of the Bible and nothing else. Like, come on. Mega churches. Joel Olstein has a mega church and he wouldn't let anyone in when there was an emergency. That tells you right there that it's all about money. The church doesn't speak on current issues. Listen, the church that I went to, they focus on tithing. They focus on how much money they can get out of you. They always talk about how important it is to get back to God. They always talk about how important it is to get back to your community. And then it's just like every Sunday, every Sunday. Every single Sunday. It's like, can we have more money? Can we have more money? It's like, what are you doing with that money? If you know improvements in the church and I worked in the church's coffee shop, they didn't pay us. And like, they put on cheap events. Like, one time we got girls ready for prom. They bought prom dresses from Goodwill. I'm like, you guys need to open your purse. You guys need to open your fucking purse. You guys have $25 million just sitting there in your Vanguard account. Open your purse. If someone needs a hell like, like, church is like, you're supposed to go there when you're in need. You know, and like, they just act like they don't have any money. One thing I don't like about the church is that there's cult-like behavior. Like, the way we pray, the way we worship, the way we condemn certain people. And like, the way we invite people, the way we save people, like, it's so cult-like. Have you ever had a Joseph Witness, Jehovah's Witness, come to your door? I'm not Jehovah's Witness, by the way. But have you ever had a Jehovah's Witness come to your door and like, we're going to pray for you, we're going to offer to pray for you. That's very cult-like behavior. And if you're not allowed to leave, that's cult-like behavior. It's true, sorry. My grandma got stuck in the Mormon church because they had promised to help her with money, gave her about $1,600 in exchange. She had to get baptized and she couldn't leave the church. My mom had to intervene and take her out of the church. Because they wouldn't let her go. They kept harassing her on her home. They kept telling her to come to church. They kept telling her to like, they'll stop helping her. If she doesn't come to church and get baptized and adopt Joseph Smith. And my grandma was trying to tell us about Joseph Smith and we were like, we don't believe in Joseph Smith. And like, so it was just a whole big thing. But I believe Christianity could denominate the regular Christianity as being attacked by Mormonism because like, Mormonism has an extra text and we don't follow extra text. And that's the whole reason why I left part of the reason why I left the church is because the rise of Mormonism. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not changing my core beliefs because I'm guy with gold plates claimed to saw Jesus like 12 years ago. Not 12 years ago, but hundreds of years ago. However, many years ago, okay? The church does not teach about the occult when it needs to. The church needs to be teaching about evils, spells, witchcraft, all that type of stuff so we can learn how to protect ourselves because there are practitioners out there of, there are Bruchettias out there, there are witches out there that practice these things against Christians. There's a tendency for the church to label everything satanic, which is really annoying. Like they could label Billie Eilish satanic because she's gay. They could label me satanic because I'm bipolar. They could label MTV satanic because it has the one eye symbol. Anything with the one eye symbol is satanic. Anything with a triangle is satanic. It's like they don't look within themselves that they could be some satanic, which is funny. And there's a whole end of the world hype that comes around every few years. There's this hysteria about the end of the world that I did not appreciate because it affects someone mentally in like a psychosis. But I say all that to say that the church is broken fundamentally. And I don't go anymore. What's the reason for me to wake up every Sunday and get dressed? And listen to some pastor spill some bullshit from two passages of the Bible and then ask me for money. I don't have money to give to the community. We're in a recession. Okay, we're in a recession. And Tommy Richmond, he came out with a new song. Do you go to church? I used to go to church every Sunday when I was little. But you got no confidence like me. Really want to roll now? Try to be. Uh, tell me no one tries to be. Hold up. This song ironically is called Devil is a Lie. Everyone in church is like fake as fuck, so I stop going. I haven't been to church in like over 10 years. This is Candace with the Manicandas podcast of why I love the Christian church. Thank you for listening. Please share with your friends, drown me your followers and I bid you a do. Bye bye.