I am an Ex-Christian.
Although the faithful undoubtedly insist that I must have
never been a sincere follower of Christ, I know in my heart that this is not
true.
I embraced the Faith early in childhood, and continued well
into middle-aged adulthood. I felt intuitively that there was something more to
life, and assumed that religion had the answers that I sought.
I don’t feel that Christianity failed me. Within its tenets,
one can find a great deal of cohesiveness and belonging. Unlike the proponents
of hard-core atheism (which is actually materialism), I never experienced a
lack of supernatural presence. Prayer actually works quite powerfully, and
there is much more to life then the temporal senses can discern.
My problem with Christianity developed because I continued
to ponder several deep philosophical questions, and it eventually became
apparent that religion could not provide the answers. Like a character in the
Star Trek Next Generation series who breaks through the wall of the Holodeck
simulation and discovers a different level of reality, I began to break through
layers of circular theological reasoning. Reality suddenly shifted and the
landscape looked much different.
Perhaps my biggest shock was the discovery that Christianity
is a fabricated, cobbled-together religion, based on a composite mixture of
preexisting mystery schools and questionable historical events in 1st
century Palestine.
How could we have missed this obvious fact? How could
millions of followers live and die for this faith based on falsehoods and
myths? The closer one looks at the evidence, the more compelling it becomes. We
have been sold a bill of goods.
The answer to how we were misled lies in the pervasiveness
of circular reasoning and the sheer weight of centuries of reinforcement.
Humans are born with an intuitive sense that reality stretches beyond the
physical, and religion appears to fill the gaps in understanding. Many want
their answers delivered as a complete package, which they never question.
As stated earlier, I am far from a materialist. Leaving
Christianity has only strengthened my embrace of spirituality. And so, another
shocking realization eventually dawned on me: Christianity is not particularly
spiritual. Not only that, but insofar as we experience the duality of “good”
versus “evil” on the physical plane, Christianity often appears to show up on
the “dark” side of things. Despite claiming to oppose evil, Christian teaching
and practice often embraces violence, fear and many things that spiritual
individuals intuitively shun. At the core is the teaching that humans
are born sinful, and must depend on a bloody human sacrifice to avoid the angry
eternal punishment of a vengeful God.
Satanists are said to practice animal or even human
sacrifice. Christians rightly condemn such practice as hideously evil, but such
is the delusional power of religion to blind them to the fact that such
practice is at the core of their biblical teaching. What kind of a God would be
driven by anger and vengeance to instruct his followers to slaughter innocent
animals on an altar? What kind of reasoning is behind the mythos of this God
finding it necessary to sacrifice his “only begotten son” in order to pardon
his children from fiery destruction?
The Old Testament is filled with brutal accounts of genocide
and butchery that were supposedly commanded by God. Modern theology contorts
into knots trying to reconcile the disparate portions of scripture into a
harmonious and consistent belief system. Despite the intense circular
reasoning, our innate intuition eventually begins to question the violent
nonsense. An archetypal knowing tells us that God is love and light, so how to
reconcile the dark, violent brutality ascribed to God in the Bible?
With the violent history behind it, it is not surprising
that Christianity has spawned violence on many occasions. Burning heretics and
“witches” at the stake are natural outcomes of a belief in an angry, vengeful
God. This God not only condones it, but expects and requires it! Modern Islamic
extremism only follows along the same logical path due to its common roots with
Judeo-Christianity.
So how did God ever get cast as the angry deity that enjoys
casting lightning bolts down on hapless people? We must take into account that
modern civilization developed in the midst of a spiritually dark and primitive
age. Earth has seen many civilizations rise and fall, and some ages in the
distant past experienced a much higher level of spiritual awareness. During the
present dark age, mankind has forgotten not only our glorious past, but our
vast potential as souls encased in human flesh. Our present western culture has
developed almost exclusively around the concept of materialism, which has its
own problems.
Earlier on, religion filled a human need by promulgating
teaching about a powerful deity that explained life in a general way. This
deity had both good and evil attributes, to reflect the many contrasts
experienced in life. Rain might fall on the crops one year, and a burning sun might
scorch crops the next. If God were thought of as all love and light, how does
one explain the tragedies and dramas of life?
Political leaders have long seen the value of religion to
control the populace. By offering a system of appeasement to the powerful deity
in the sky, people can be conditioned to follow whatever rules are put in
place. But stray from the straight and narrow, then look out! Then it follows
that sinners deserve their punishment, and thus developed the concept of sin
and redemption. Follow the rules and abide by the ecclesiastical establishment,
and the believer is assured of salvation.
But what if that’s not how it really works…
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