The Black Sheep

About a year ago I wrote an article on my experiences with fundamental or Born Again evangelical Christianity, Causing outrage and applause from everyone who read it. Its been awhile since then and I have had more time to contemplate, research, banter and argue. I also took a very angst and aggressive approach to get my points across, so I think its time to be a little more scholarly and outline things a little better.

I first became a born Again Christian at a Bible camp in 1987 I was 13 years old. for the next 12 years I struggled with this tyrannical form of Christianity. I can only compare my experiences to something out of a TV cult expose. I have to admit – Evangelical Christianity is a very powerful “cult” and I use the term loosely. I was literally afraid for my eternal soul when I began to question it. And I began to do some real reading into the real origins of man and the development of religion as part of human psyche, as well as the actual genesis of the book we call the Bible. This finally allowed me to see what should have been obvious from the beginning. And whenever I raised these difficult questions I stood out like a leper at a tanning salon I was told to have faith. To go and pray, Christianity requires you to accept and believe, not to think or question. The bottom line that led to my escape, however, is a less philosophical question: If Jesus truly lives in my heart, I asked, why do I still feel so God-damned empty? And if he does not, if it is all a game, what damage had I done to myself by conforming so utterly to the simple-minded, robotic, dogma-spouting mindset modelled by the elders of the Church. I am still a little bitter I must admit The rigid rules that for over 12 years governed what I wore, how I dressed, how I entertained myself, how I related to people, were impressed on me during my most formative years. How much of my life and intellect was wasted thinking the world was about to end when reading the left behind series of books. I was in agony, dealing with the command to save everyone I met from eternal hell. The misery of being intellectually inclined in a world on the cusp of the computer age, yet being told time and again that computers, supermarket scanners, video games and credit cards were luring unsuspecting people to take the Mark of the Beast. “You got to be joking” you might be asking scratching your head? trust me this is just a small view of this insane circus. But on the bright side, my experiences have encouraged me to be more open-minded to other views, tolerant, compassionate and non-judgmental. I’m extremely determined to read, learn and experience everything so I don’t regret things left undone at the end of my life. I’ve also decided that my religion won’t “wear” me, instead, I try to integrate my beliefs and ideas into my daily life, so that I live with integrity, responsible only to myself and the state of my soul.

In the words of “Lon Milo Duquette”, Do I believe in an Afterlife? Do I believe in karma and rein-carnation? Do I believe in heaven or hell? Am I afraid to die? The answer to all these questions is a qualified “YES.”
On the other hand, if you ask me if I believe that when I die I will be hauled into some celestial courtroom to appear before the God of Judgment who will convict me on evidence of my failure in life to sacrifice my intelligence and common sense in order to believe unquestionably in a particular cult’s interpretation of the details surrounding an historical or mythological event, and/or my inability, or disinclination to submit to a particular collection of ancient superstitions and tribal taboos, then the answer is an unqualified “NO!”
I am perpetually amazed that stable intelligent people – people with driver’s licenses and university degrees. People who can finish the Daily crossword puzzle and run huge corporations. People who otherwise display the most superior powers of intelligence and insight can actually look me in the eye and tell me in deadly earnest that they believe:
That all human beings have been cursed by the creator of the universe because of the very fact that we where born.
That because we are already guilty of committing life, the creator has condemned us to eternal torture after we die.
That we plea bargain ourselves out of this fate by perfectly surrendering to certain mental and behavioral parameters that are outlined in a book composed of 66 chapters written over a period of hundreds of years by an unknown number of authors in an assortment of languages- an unerring book that has been translated scores of times by individuals employed by intensely biased institutions.
That after we die our corpses (at some unspecified date in the future) will reanimate like zombies and fly up from our graves and hover in the sky at the side of our deity who, sitting on a flying horse, will slaughter one third of the population of the planet. Afterwards this same deity will preside over the ultimate kangaroo court in the clouds and issue one-way tickets to the lake of fire to the newly murdered and all the others who in life did not unquestionably believe that all this was the only spiritual game plan in town.
I am sorry I cannot see how blindly accepting the above doctrine (or any of a hundred others just as ludicrous) could possibly be good for ones mental health. As a matter of fact, it appears obvious to me that in order for a rational, intelligent person to subscribe to such silliness and still live a relatively normal life, he or she must set aside a small corner of the brain devoted exclusively to religious mental illness, and visit that area as infrequently as possible..

The scary things is I embraced this for so many years believing it
unquestionably. honestly deep down I always did question, but did not have the knowledge to make any rational distinction between fact and fiction or have other opinions to judge the myths being presented. I still feel there is a wealth of knowledge in the Bible and as a spiritual framework it is solid enough.

Christianity is a belief in Jesus, not the Bible. The Bible is a book assembled, written, and edited by men. While some fundamentalist preachers will say that the Bible is the written word of God, it doesn’t change the fact that every word in the Bible was written by human beings. Despite the fact that parts of the Bible contain misleading information and in many cases, doctored information, there is none the less, a vast body of uplifting text within the Bible that can lead to spiritual inspiration and growth.
The thing is to look to the words of Jesus for inspirations, just as we can look to the words of Buddha or Krishna, or even those of Confucius for statements of WISDOM and universal TRUTH. We learn to follow a better path by heeding the advice of spiritually advanced teachers and prophets. Those who condemn others because they don’t embrace the words of THEIR particular spiritual teacher are fools and ignoramuses. Don’t fall in with those wild eyed maniacs because they will exhaust you and turn you into a judgmental robot and make you a slave to their dogma.
Jesus did not teach anything of dogma. He spoke to the heart of men about the truth of God and how we can be at peace in our heart and live in happiness and joy while on earth and go on to love all the creatures of creation and in doing so, we learn to love the Creator in greater depth and with deeper meaning.
The Kingdom of God is within Jesus said, and so it is. The spark of God is WITHIN every single one of us and the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can free ourselves of the misery of collective guilt and cult sensibilities.
The greatest affronts to the words of Jesus are those who wear their ‘Christianity’ on their sleeve and preach judgmentalism and wrath and smiting of perceived foes.