God

Testimonia

Do I believe in you?

Being a kid that was always afraid of the world I used God as my shield to protect myself of the bad things. My mother taught how to pray, how to be good christian and how to see church as my second home. I am 19 years old now and I can say that religion is not the path that I am following.

When you came from a latino family, you know that you only have two choices: or you are a christian or you are a “muchacha del diablo”. When you are a kid the only thing that you do is follow, you follow what others do and say, you don’t want to be nothing related with the diablo because that is bad and you know it.

God was my shield back in the time because I used to be scared, I didn’t know of what I was scared until now. I WAS SCARED OF GOD HIMSELF. Religion was used on me as an oppression system, where he rewards you if you are good, and he punish you if you are bad. Being a kid and be scared caused me problems, I get to anxious of simple things because “bad things were coming”. My father notices that I was anxious and he asked me what was happening to me, and I didn’t know my answer every time was “I am scared”. My father never believe in God as a superior power, but he was the one that teach me to believe in myself and not to be afraid of future bad things, that the only thing that you need is to be a good person and not to harm anyone. Little by little I understand it and I was not longer afraid of being outside, I was not longer afraid of the darkness, I did not longer believe in the diablo.

Until today, religion is used as a system to scare people. People still believe that in order to be a good person you need to believe in something, otherwise you are not complete. Society needs to understand that religion is good to use if you want to teach someone to be a spiritual person or to search in their soul, but it is not okay to use it to spread fear, specially on kids.

As Martha Quintanales, I grew up and I use education an science as my guide.  I still think in God as a superior power, but he is not my answer for everything  anymore.