A Religious Guide to Sabotaging Your Life:

1. Begin with the premise that there is something hopelessly and incurably wrong with you.

2. Believe that your humanity is an offense needing forgiveness, an illness needing cured, a monster to be feared, and an evil to repress.

3. Pin your hopes on the afterlife, and don’t get too vested in the herelife.

4. Mistrust your innermost thoughts and feelings.

5. Give others the power and authority to determine what your beliefs, values, opinions, goals, desires, and views are.

6. Fear, reject, condemn, and close yourself off from anyone or anything that isn't approved by the above "others."

7. Focus on behavior modification, checklists, do’s and don’ts, obedience, and keeping the rules.

8. Give up or kill off your needs, desires, interests and aspirations as a sign of spiritual maturity and call it “dying to self.”

9. Make sure everything and everyone in life is assigned a label or put into a box.

10. Mistrust science, psychology and philosophy as “secular,” “carnal,” or “worldly,” and stay away from it.

11. Consider talk of love, unity, harmony, peace, beauty and oneness as childish, foolish, idealistic, or dangerous.

12. Draw a line between “sacred” and “secular” and divide up the world accordingly.

13. Separate humankind into “us” and “them,” and stay away from “them” and judge “them” from a distance.

14. Lock up and throw away the key to your sexuality and get busy focusing on something that is holy.

15. Put forth a valiant effort to project and maintain an image that lines up with the expectations of your religious community, and hide the ways you don’t.

16. Don’t ask questions, rock the boat, challenge authority, think for yourself, or listen to that voice inside… just keep doing or believing even if it violates something deep inside of you.

- Jim Palmer #exvangelical #ExChristian