I No Longer Believe the Resurrection of Jesus Christ for now at least.

Thinking critically about the beliefs that were given to me.

Well, we are thirteen days into the new year, and it’s been an interesting ride already.

Not because of the headlines, but because of where I’ve landed with my faith. Now, this may seem weird, but I don’t identify as Christian.

I do believe in Jesus as the Messiah. So where does that land me? Well, my practice of Christianity and my observation of it all seem like it’s fear-based.

What I’ve realized is that much of what I practiced wasn’t faith, it was risk management. Avoid hell. Avoid God’s disappointment. Avoid being wrong. Avoid being seen as rebellious. Avoid uncertainty at all costs.

That posture trains a person to live forward-leaning into imagined consequences instead of actually living. It rewards compliance over curiosity and calls it obedience. It mistakes anxiety for conviction and fear for reverence.

I don’t reject Jesus. I reject a system that taught me to distrust my own conscience, my own nervous system, and my own capacity for moral reasoning. If truth requires me to suspend discernment, that’s not truth, that’s control.

Belief that can’t survive honest examination isn’t sacred. It’s fragile.

If following Jesus means becoming more grounded, more truthful, more compassionate, and more responsible for my actions, then fear is a terrible teacher. Fear doesn’t produce love. It produces surveillance. Internal surveillance. Thought policing. Endless self-monitoring dressed up as holiness.

I’m no longer interested in a faith that only works if I stay afraid.

If people were honest about why they identify as Christian, many would admit it wasn’t born out of love or transformation, but fear. Fear of hell. Fear of eternal consequences. Fear of being wrong when the stakes are infinite.

The raised hand. The sinner’s prayer. The public moment of decision. For a lot of people, those weren’t acts of devotion. They were acts of self-preservation. A way to reduce existential risk.

I don’t even think that makes them bad people. Fear is a powerful motivator, especially when it’s introduced early and reinforced by authority. But a system that relies on fear to secure allegiance looks less like love and more like control.

If God needs terror to compel a relationship, something is off. Love doesn’t require threats. Truth doesn’t need coercion. And a faith that only works if people are afraid of eternal punishment is not spiritually mature. It’s behaviorally effective.

I also have fundamental problems with how sin, the devil, and God’s knowledge of human thought are traditionally understood. I don’t accept those frameworks anymore.

Sin, as I’ve experienced it, isn’t evil in some metaphysical sense. It’s misalignment. It’s behavior that emerges from fear, conditioning, trauma, and unchecked impulse. Calling it “evil” adds moral theater but explains nothing. It obscures cause and replaces responsibility with shame.

I don’t believe the devil is a literal being whispering temptations into human minds. That model externalizes human psychology and turns our own impulses into an enemy. Desire, aggression, lust, and fear don’t need a supernatural villain. They’re native to the hardware.

And I don’t believe God is monitoring my thoughts, policing my internal world, or assigning guilt to involuntary mental activity. Thoughts arise automatically. They are not choices.

Treating them as moral offenses creates anxiety, not virtue. A system that makes people afraid of their own minds is not producing holiness. It’s producing self-surveillance.

If God exists, I don’t believe He relates to humans by constantly assessing threats. Moral responsibility begins with action and intention, not with the spontaneous noise of consciousness.

I do believe Jesus was the Messiah. I believe something real and transformative happened through his life, his death, and what followed. But I no longer feel the need to lock that belief into a rigid, fear-based framework that demands certainty where mystery may be more honest.

The resurrection, as I understand it now, doesn’t function for me as a threat or a cosmic proof-text. I don’t experience it as a lever meant to force belief through fear of consequences. Instead, I see it as the continuation of a movement. A radical reorientation of how humans relate to power, suffering, forgiveness, and responsibility. Something that didn’t end at the tomb, but lived on through people changed by what Jesus embodied.

I’m not interested in using the resurrection as a boundary marker that divides who is “in” and who is “out.” I’m interested in what it points toward. Renewal. Transformation. Life emerging from collapse. Meaning forged in suffering rather than erased by it.

Because of that, I don’t identify as Christian in the institutional or cultural sense. That label carries assumptions I no longer hold. Assumptions about fear, control, certainty, and moral surveillance that don’t align with where I am now.

What I’m left with is Jesus, not Christianity. A teacher, a disruptor, a model of grounded love and responsibility, rather than a mascot for anxiety or a gatekeeper for the afterlife.

That may change as my understanding deepens. I’m not closing the door. I’m just refusing to pretend certainty where I don’t have it.

For now, this is where I stand.