Why I Left the Cult of William Branham

          I would like to start with saying that I did not leave the message so that I could experience “the things of the world”. It is my hope that by the end of this that even if you do not agree with me will at least understand that it was not a decision based off of emotion, want for pleasure, or because I thought it would make life easier. I left the message because I could no longer stay knowing that I did not believe it. The purpose of this blog entry is to explain the thought process that has led me to where I am today. I will try to write everything in this entry as I thought about it at the time I thought of it. I will start at my earliest concerns which are more foundational to what I believed than even the message, expand to include the message itself, describe as briefly as is reasonable what I believe today, and then end in conclusion.

I will not lie, my doubt had been going on for years. I found myself doubting everything that did not seem reasonably possible. Anything that seemed like that it could not have a more likely explanation that could actually be confirmed possible by facts. However, I would generally tell myself that I have to just believe by faith. After all, if I did not do this than God would judge me for doubting his word. There were however several things that bothered me. One of my biggest points of confusion was why does the bible seem to be so sexist? To me it was obvious that both men and women were equally intelligent. Was God really so petty that he would make all females subject to the man for something that happened 8 thousand years ago? To prevent them from having equal rights to even speak in the church? That did not add up for me, but I continued on. Maybe if I spent enough time praying in my closet where not even my parents knew where I was praying that God would take away all my doubts and help me to believe it would all make sense?

I’ve always in my own opinion been a very empathetic person. I go out of my way when I’m checking out to make sure I try to positively influence the day of the cashier, the waiter, or whoever else I interact with. When I was a young kid I had borrowed my uncles SNES game Zelda: Link to the Past. He gave only one instruction “Don’t erase my saved game”. This wasn’t a problem. I had my own save game on his cartridge. However, I took the game over to my friend’s house and they asked if they could play. I said sure. When I wasn’t in the room they erased my uncles saved game which was almost to the end. I was devastated. Not because I thought my uncle would be mad at me, but because I knew the disappointment my uncle would have when he found out. This may seem meaningless to most people in the context of this post, but it’s not to me. The point of all this is, I care a lot about the wellbeing of others. Their feelings matter to me. I would never intentionally inflict any kind of emotional or physical pain on anyone. This presented a major problem for me as someone who believed in both the bible and the message. The God of the old testament clearly demonstrates no value of life for any that do not follow him to the letter of the law, or of those not of the people of Israel. “Thus saith the LORD of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. 1 Samuel 15:2-3”. That is not an isolated verse. There are multiple accounts of genocide condoned by the God of the bible. But there must have been a reason for it right? There had to be some way to rationalize it, I just hadn’t found it yet. So for now, I will pray in my closet and try harder to make myself believe.

Every Christian believer whether message or otherwise knows about hell. It’s where God sends all the unbelievers when they die. The message expands on this a little bit. Only those who are elected get to be raptured. The rest must go through the tribulation period because they neglected to get the oil (the Holy Ghost) and cannot be part of the wedding supper. Most message churches believe that you cannot even be part of that group, the foolish virgins, unless they were part of the message. There is another way to get in, but only if you did something good for the bride while they are on earth. The rest according to at least most message churches go to hell. This bothered me quite a bit, and I actually spoke somewhat against this idea even while apart of the message. Just because people aren’t selected to have a “revelation” they are condemned to hell fire? I didn’t want to see any of my friends go to hell. It would seem unthinkable to even think about it. I don’t have any friends that aren’t good natured people that would do anything for you. And they are going to be sent to hell because they don’t believe what I do? It’s just the devil Bryant, I need to go to the alter to have this demon prayed out. My prayers are not enough by themselves, I need the joint praying power of the saints.

Why are these thoughts still plaguing me? It’s just the devil. Don’t question it, you may blaspheme without even knowing it and condemn yourself to hell. Ok. Well, maybe I can at least evaluate what I believe through the parameters that William Branham himself gave right? That’s what I’ll do. He said to judge him by the Word, so I’ll just take it to the bible and everything will all make sense. But he also says, that I have to have a revelation to see it his way so how am I supposed to know if I’m reading it right? I guess all I can do is pray that I do. Surely God will not judge someone who is honestly searching for truth right? So I search. I start with Genesis and serpent seed, the belief that the serpent was actually an upright walking animal almost like man that impregnated Eve with Cain. Now if you ask most message people if Genesis is an allegory they will say no. However I realize Genesis Chapter 3 is clearly talking about a literal garden, with multiple literal trees. The idea behind serpent seed however is that the fruit is the fruit of the womb. Now I’ve read this scripture multiple times growing up under the context of serpent seed being true, but now this was falling apart to me. The bible says that the fruit was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and she decided to eat it. She also gave the same fruit to Adam to eat. This is obviously literal. Ok, I’m prayfully checking this with what William Branham taught. He said to check what he taught by the Word, not the Word by the revelation. But he also says to believe what he said until you get the revelation of what he said. But then what if I was supposed to be doing what the bible said and judge what he teaches by the bible? So many voices. Do I choose to do what the bible says and judge what he says by the bible itself, or do I do what he say and also to wait for the revelation that it’s right? What if revelation is just a belief you brainwash yourself to believe? Well, I thought about it and realized that telling you to both judge what he preached by the word, and to also believe what he said until you got the revelation is a major contradiction. It also occurred to me at this time that it would be an excellent way to deceive someone. Tell them that what they taught was true despite the evidence that seems to contradict it. But wait, what about the discernments and the healings. I just don’t understand it all yet. God will reveal it to me and then all will be clear. I’ll continue to pray, it doesn’t make sense to me now, but he said the angel spoke to him and that he was vindicated. He gave prophesies that came to pass right?

The thoughts of friends going to hell is returning. How does a benevolent God send people to hell for eternity? Apparently this thought bothered William Branham too, because he found a roundabout way to make forever mean a space of time. What he believed would actually only be thousands of years. I was certainly ok with the time being reduced, but 5 seconds in a fiery pit is too long for my empathy. I think of Hitler who sends the Jews to concentration camps and others to be killed in gas chambers because they were not in his idea of an Arian race. We consider Hitler to be a terrible person for sending innocent people to the gas chambers where they would die over a short period of time. What if Hitler actually could have prevented people from dying in a way that they could still feel pain and thirst and throw them into a fiery pit to be burned alive for thousands of years? That would be unthinkable. There would be no crime on earth including murder that would justify that harsh of a punishment. Do people even have free will anyways strictly speaking? God places the person on the earth exactly where he wants them, knowing because he’s the one who created the soul and body both which decisions they will make. I realize he places some people in a burning building knowing they will never find a way out and be condemned to burn in the fire. I don’t know, but none of this seems right to me now. Lord please reveal to me why this is okay for me to do, or blind me to the fact that this goes against everything my conscience stands for. 

It was around this time Believethesign.com came into the picture with their humble pie apology. I knew Seekyethetruth.com had been around for a while, but I never looked into it because it had to be just some disgruntled message believer hurt by his specific minister. Or someone deceived by Satan himself. I realized however after the humble pie apology, that the only person I was basing the validation of any of William Branham’s prophesies was William Branham himself. However, I knew that those in charge of Believethesign.com were former members of a church whose pastor had been caught in a big lie, and thought they were likely just hurt and thereby could not form an objective opinion about the message. All of these prophesies had to have been right, otherwise why would so many believe it? I did my best to counter BTS. You cannot prove that this prophesy didn’t happen I said. After all, that prophesy in question he told about after the fact anyways. There are no records of him giving it until after it would have happened so how could he have given it wrong after the fact? Well, I began to realize the first part by itself should have always been a problem to me. There were no prophesies that he gave specifics on that I knew of on tape that he gave until after the fact. I then began to realize the second part was problem too. I was supposed to judge prophesy by whether it came to pass, not on whether I could prove that it didn’t come to pass or not. That could be an argument with almost any prophesy. Not only that, but according to the bible if even one of these prophesies are wrong I’m supposed to never listen to that prophet again. This cannot be happening. My entire world is the message. All of my friends are in the message. If I have to swallow my pride and admit I’ve always been wrong I will lose all of my friends, and I definitely don’t know how my family will react. I still felt I could not just take the articles written by STT and BTS at face value. I searched as best as I could for myself, and to my disappointment I could not find anything to prove Believethesign.com wrong. That did not stop me from debating them though. I would find a weakness if I tried hard enough. The more I tried though, the more I realized that every argument I gave had holes all through it. There was no way to defend this. I had been deceived into believing in a false prophet, and I had no idea what to do about it. I had to be wrong. I just needed to pray. God would show me how he didn’t actually miss these prophesies, he just didn’t understand them correctly.

It was sometime in the fall of 2012 that a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while sent me text. She asked me “What do you think about all the BTS and STT stuff?” I was at my grandma’s house at the time, with the message collection Hebrews with me to read. Maybe if I keep reading the message I will start to see it. God will give me a revelation on why all of the contradictions, and failed prophesies don’t matter. I mean, some people do really claim to have been healed right? But as I read her text and thought about it I began to be honest with myself, there was no justification. I had judged him by the conditions he set. I had judged him by the conditions the bible set. And I had judged him according to my own conscience. In all three accounts he had failed. Most message believers will not believe me when I say this because while in the message it is preached that people who leave know that they are wrong, and they are doing it so that they can experience the world. But I say honestly that leaving the message was the hardest thing I have ever done. I didn’t want to leave, but my conscience wouldn’t allow me to stay. The correspondence went on with my friend, but it eventually came to me saying “I think that the message is wrong, and I’ll probably be resigning from my positions at the church as soon as I can think of a way to do it.”

This was easier said than done. I did go to my pastor however and tell him that I had doubts that I had to sort out, and that while I try to work things out I had to resign from my position on the missionary board. He agreed that it was the right thing for me to do if I had doubts, and offered to talk to me if I ever had any questions. One thing I will say is the pastor I had at this time was a good man. He did not try to make me feel bad for questioning or for any of my decisions. I did continue to search, but by that point I had seen more than enough to prevent me from believing the message for another day. My questions now went deeper. I had learned how manipulation worked, and I wanted to find out how deep it went. To quote Brian Tracy “Your beliefs act as a set of filters that screen out information that is inconsistent with them. You do not necessarily believe what you see, but rather you see what you already believe. You reject information that contradicts what you have already decided to believe, whether or not your beliefs, your prejudices, are based on fact or fantasy.” I knew I had to evaluate everything that I had believed from a new viewpoint. If I was wrong in one area, I was almost definitely wrong in others too. I had to be sure. I have already made it clear that some of my earliest doubts were not actually of the message itself, but of Christianity as a whole so it will come as no surprise that it was my next step of validation.

Now, regardless of how pious you are questioning what you believe at this deep a level is intimidating. It is one thing to find out you have been wrong according to the context of the bible, it’s another thing entirely to question the bible itself. In the United States it’s almost unheard of, especially in the bible belt of the south. I had to be careful, what if questioning at this deep a level was wrong and was blasphemy? Well, in the interest of objectivity the logical place to start was to look at other religions which I did. I started thinking about why does Christianity have more credibility than the other religions, or did it? After reading up on them I decided at face value at least Judaism, Buddhism (which is more of a philosophy in my opinion), and Hinduism were no less credible. Well, I will put this in the back pocket for now and move forward. A lot of religious people will start disregarding everything I say at this point, and that’s okay I guess. Why? Because the next step of my journey of science.

Well, I will admit that even as a message believer and Christian I would try to work in science to the belief. I would try to make the gap theory work to factor in what I knew the age of the earth had been discovered to be. I never could find a way to make evolution work out in the bible, but in the back of my mind I believed it. I just hadn’t found a way to reconcile it. At this point I reviewed what I knew about science, and also looked into different people’s ideas to reconcile the bible with the natural world. I looked into intelligent design theories. There wasn’t a single theory that I could justify reconciling. I know many of you if you are still reading are telling me “It is faith Bryant, you can’t make it work intellectually”. Well, for me that’s a problem. Why would God go so far out of his way to make it look like the universe was older than the bible said it was, and then expect us to believe that it was only 8 thousand years old? Why would God place fossils in the ground showing us our path of evolution to deceive us? “The fossil records are incomplete Bryant”. Well, they are pretty complete actually once I looked into it. Because I did check. Remember, the further I drift from what I grew up in, the less I have in common with my friends and family. I would have rather proved intelligent design and just moved on with my life. But I couldn’t. I have watched debate after debate. I have watched documentaries explaining “Darwin’s Black Box”, and always the evidence for evolution disproved everything that was presented when I looked for myself. “You’re being deceived by the devil Bryant, science is just the devils religion and he’s got you right in his grasp”. Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.

Now let’s take a break from the narrative for a moment to have a conversation. If I was trying to deceive a group of people into believing in invisible Martians and didn’t want to risk you finding something that went against it how would I do it? Would I tell them to make their own observations, formulate a hypothesis, test it multiple times, and then publish their findings as a theory? Only if I’m an idiot. They would find out I was lying pretty fast I would think. But if I tell them that the invisible Martians are real, but they mustn’t try to do their own search for themselves. That would be the better of the two strategies. The deception still isn’t perfect though. Let us throw in a dash a fear. I want you scared to not believe in the Martians so if you don’t I tell you that you will spend forever with your head stuck in Martian sand. “That’s all well and good, but why would they have started believing in the first place?” Very good point! I’m glad you’re getting involved in the discussion. They need a bait so to speak. Why don’t we tell them that the Martians can forgive everything you have ever done wrong! Target those with regrets, which is practically everyone. “Why would they believe the Martians would forgive anyone?” Again great point, we have to tell the people that the Martians are full of love and mercy. Let’s go ahead and even throw in the added bonus of living forever in another dimension and we have them hooked for life! We really only have to hook one generation, and then they’ll pass it down themselves. They’ll undoubtedly divide into sects as disagreements arise, but they will all believe in the invisible Martians. “I get what you’re saying Bryant, but your ‘Martians’ don’t have any signs or wonders.” Again great point, but while you are at least considering the rest of my points let’s move on with the narrative.

The feelings you get during worship and prayer, the healings and discernments you hear about. What do they mean? Are the feelings caused by a state of mind, how do I reach that? These are the questions I am asking myself at this point. They hadn’t mattered when it came down to the message itself, but surely it couldn’t have all been synthetic right? You can’t fake feeling the presence of the Holy Ghost…right? “No! You can’t! And don’t try proving that the feeling of the Holy Ghost is just a state of mind or you’ll blaspheme!” Yikes there, why would a benevolent God care if I try to see how the sensations of deep prayer and of worship are achieved? Well, if you’re offended you certainly don’t have to continue reading. To you at this point I am probably a tool of the devil trying be a stumbling block to the true believers. I certainly understand and can relate to the feeling and have no hard feelings. Well, there may be fewer of us reading at this point, but that’s fine. This is a story of my journey, and even in the best case scenario as far as I’m concerned it will only start yours. You definitely should not use this as your own decision maker. You need to do the research for yourself, and in my opinion you would be wrong to take my word for any of this. Anyways, back to the topic at hand. I thought about what prayer was at its roots. You are kneeling, thinking and concentrating on what you want from God. You are thanking him for the blessings of your life. Well I had studied meditation before so it didn’t seem too farfetched that the elation that comes from prayer could also come from meditation. It was worth a try right? Well, I discovered that given enough time of meditating your mind became clear. It became clear how I should handle a certain situations I was facing in my life. It was an identical experience to when you believed you had received instructions from God on how to handle a situation. This was big, but it did not answer all of my questions. Worship was much easier for me to get a grasp on however. I had seen how the atmosphere of a song can affect an entire crowd. After all in the DVD “Music, Might, and Manipulation” had been passed out to show the devil could simulate worship. What if it was all psychological? After all, I had listened to songs and gotten caught up in them in the same way I got caught up in Christian songs. If I didn’t want my believers doubting God’s influence over the worship service would I not tell them that all other music was evil? You may disagree with me on this point, and that’s fine. As far as I’m concerned though it’s all a state of the mind.

Now, I admit that during my research I have not found a way to heal people. So assuming it was done, how was it done? Well certainly many people claim to have been healed in WMB’s services, Oral Roberts services, and according to WMB’s 64-0823E message “Questions and Answers” healings even happened in the Beatles concerts. I cannot answer how it happens, not honestly anyways. I can explain the placebo effect and spontaneous recession/regression though.  I will only say that test group 1 would be given the actual drug, and test group 2 would be given a sugar pill or placebo. People that take the placebo and believe that it is going to work often find some of their symptoms going away, and likewise those who do not believe the placebo is going to work often find their symptoms getting worst. There are reports of spontaneous remission and even regression of cancer being caused by meditation. So if I was a renowned faith healer and told you to believe without a shadow of a doubt that you were healed and that the sickness would come back if you claimed otherwise wouldn’t you continue to claim it even if you weren’t healed?  WMB may have assisted people at achieving the right state of mind to allow their body to be healed, but that certainly does not erase everything else he has done and make him a prophet. Even if it is God that is responsible for the healings as a result of the peoples “faith” it still would not be WMB’s faith, it would be the people’s faith. Many of the discernments could easily have been faked. Derren Brown is a fantastic cold reader. He can by talking to someone tell them numerous things about themselves that no one but them would know. Imagine if you had the added benefit of prayer cards that include the name, address, and illness of the person in question? Now imagine that you have ushers or even a son that travel with you that can do hot reading in the audience before the service for you. “Now Bryant you are just being a doubter. With that attitude how would you ever believe a true prophet if he really did come” Well, as I stated before at this point we have already established that he a false prophet. We are only trying to find out if he can do the things he says he can. Who knows maybe he did have some sort of discernment that for whatever reason was sometimes wrong, but once wrong the entire thing is without. The greater miracle by far would be that he was actually discerning them, it’s not nearly as farfetched to believe the alternative I have just described. I encourage you to look up an interesting illusion that was given to me my by a friend to watch. It’s called “The Magic Bullet illusion” performed by Penn and Teller. Do you have any clue how they pull it off? I sure don’t, but I’m not going to believe their claim that it’s magic. In short, I don’t have an explanation that will work for everyone on healing and discernment, I can only tell you what I think about it.

So many of you who were never part of the message are probably reading this and are asking yourself “Why would anyone believe this!” Well, there are many reasons. The prospect of someone with signs and wonders following him is pretty tempting. You are going to give this person more leeway even if you don’t see right away how his doctrines line up with the bible. “But what about after it’s pointed out that no specific prophesy on tape came to pass after he gave it?” Ah, this is where it comes to something called sunken costs. I left the message when I was 23, and even by that amount of time I had given hundreds hours of my time resources, thousands of dollars of my money, and had believed something was absolute truth for my entire life! Imagine you have a really old car for a moment, or maybe you don’t have to imagine. Over the last year you have spent $4000 dollars and things seem to keep breaking in your, let’s say, 1982 Mercedes sedan. Your transmission goes out, and it will cost you $2000 more to fix. You know that $2000 is more than the car is currently even worth, but you have already spent $4000 over the last year trying to fix it. If you sell it now all that money will be down the drain! And so it should be, at this point you need to invest in a better car. Another and perhaps easier example is stock. Let’s say you own $50000 worth of stock at $60 a share. The price of the stock goes down 10 business days straight now stock is down to $40 a share. Well you don’t want to sell of course because you will lose all of that investment! Well, the stock never goes back up. It eventually goes down to 0 and you’ve lost what you could have gotten back on your investment had you tried to sell earlier. Just think of someone that has been in the message since they were born in 1962. Think of the countless days, money, and effort they have placed into the message. They have not only themselves believed, but they have also influenced others to believe it. They can’t quit now, the cost would be too high! Well, unfortunately once you realize something is no longer worth the investment it’s time to sell. Why pour more of your resources of time and money into something that you are only justifying to be right because of your perceived loss? I’m not saying it’s easy, because it’s not. You’re most likely going to lose friends. You will be criticized. People will tell you that you have been deceived and you will probably even get preached about by the message churches you used to attend. I can only try to convince you the opportunity cost is worth it.

While the last 5000 words have attempted to show you the journey I have taken to come to my current understanding of the universe, it is not even close to being a complete picture. My opinion of the existence of a benevolent god consists of more than the fact that the God of the bible ordered the Israelites to wipe out an entire tribe, more than just because the bible is sexist and more than because it implies that a benevolent God is compatible with the existence of hell. When I evaluated the message I did not stop at serpent seed, I looked into many of the other doctrines as well. While Believethesign.com, and Seekthetruth.com played a role in the journey, they were not the start nor the end of it. My point of, my journey consists of much more than I can fit in this article. I would need a book. As you have seen my journey was not based on a desire to experience more of “the world”, but certainly the result has been a broader “world view”. Have I arrived at the correct conclusion on everything? I sure hope not! If I’m already right about everything at my age I’m going to have a long boring life ahead of me. No, I know I will always be learning. My mind will always be broadening. I will continue to do my best to learn from others what they can teach me, and maybe by the time I am 127 ½ I will at least be reasonably closer to having things figured out. My name is Bryant Lane, I am a former follower of the false prophet William Branham, and a free thinker.

“Your beliefs act as a set of filters that screen out information that is inconsistent with them. You do not necessarily believe what you see, but rather you see what you already believe. You reject information that contradicts what you have already decided to believe, whether or not your beliefs, your prejudices, are based on fact or fantasy.” – Brian Traci