Do you NOT believe in any form of God

Well, my friend, it sounds like you have started down a road that may lead you in some surprising and unexpected directions. There is a 3-hour YouTube video called Why I Am No Longer A Christian that you might want to check out. I wish I could provide a link but I am not a digital native; I am barely literate, just enough to get by and that's that.

I understand where you are coming from but I think if your goal is to become a full, true Christian, you may not be on the right path. That is what the narrator of Why I Am No Longer A Christian came to realize. He started delving more and more into his faith and into Scripture only to find that his faith was not built on rock as he'd thought, but on sand. In my case it was the same thing. Long story, won't go into it here, but various factors led me to start digging into the history of church and Bible only to find that it wasn't what I had been taught to believe. As the narrator of WIANLAC was told early in his quest by a man he came to see as his mentor in these matters, "If you are happy with the conclusions you have reached so far, then do not go any further. Turn back now, and do not continue this relationship with me." This man had also gone on a quest seeking deeper knowledge of his Christian faith and ended up firmly on the outside.

Everyone is different, of course. And no doubt you will be told (or tell yourself) not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is where I think you are at right now. All I can say is that over the years I carefully ladled out cup after cup of bathwater, hoping not to disturb the baby, but eventually it became obvious that if there ever was a baby in the bathtub, it was long gone. You would think (and I realize this is a gruesome image) that sooner or later I would bump into an arm or a leg or a head, but no, it was water all the time. That is where I am now.

Also, I have noticed, that certain kinds of education is absolutely deadly to Christian faith, at least certain forms of it. I don't know your religious background, but in my experience it is those who come from a fundamentalist/evangelical/Pentecostal background where every word of the Bible is literally true who suffer the greatest crises of faith. Those who come from Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal backgrounds do not seem to experience as much conflict and cognitive dissonance, perhaps because that particular strain of Christianity is not as anti-intellectual as others. What I mean is that they seem to be able to compartmentalize better and so the crisis of faith never comes or is delayed. It can still happen. I come from a Catholic background and I am aware of the rich intellectual tradition of that church and its greater willingness to accommodate to the findings of modern science. For example, evolution is not the stumbling block that it is in more Bible-only churches, so it is possible to blend science and religion and live happily ever after. And many people do indeed take the Professor's advice to the young seeker in Why I Am No Longer A Christian and stop right there. I don't judge them. Maybe they know something I don't know, maybe they have found something I haven't found. But I can no longer combine and compromise. My journey led me further.

I say education because it was at a large state-run university that I encountered views and opinions (and not just science) that challenged my understanding of my faith as a Catholic Christian who was strongly influenced by evangelical Protestantism. I was exposed to things that neither Catholicism nor evangelical Protestantism could really give any answers to. Worse yet, I got the distinct impression that they did not want to answer these questions and they did not want me asking them. The same thing happened with the narrator of WIANLAC. In fact, many "deconverts" have similar stories to tell. It was their relentless pursuit of the truth that led them out of the faith.

So again, I am saying this as a warning. At some point you may have to decide what is important to you and what you are and are not willing to give up. I am not sure it is possible for me to return to being a "full, true Christian" because in order to do so, based on what I have seen and heard in various churches, I would have to leave my brains and education at the door. I am absolutely serious about this. The only church that I have found that welcomes and encourages seekers like me is the Unitarian-Universalist church. In all my years of church-hopping and seeking (I am in my 50's) this is the only church (other than my birth church) that I ever formally joined--and I joined it three months after my first visit. Because I knew then this was home.

My goal is not to become a Christian, not necessarily. My goal is to try and figure out if there is any meaning or truth to all this. If there is, I want to know. If not, at the very least, I'll have a much better understanding of scripture, and of Christian theology. I like knowledge, and learning things, so I would value theological knowledge too, whether or not it was actually a belief system I ascribed to.

I do find that when I have read books about why someone isn't Christian (or religious), or books that pick apart Christianity, etc, I end up basically losing any faith I had again. Which, yes, suggests that Christianity doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny, the same way that when I looked at other religions in the past, none of them stood up to scrutiny either. It's why I ended up agnostic after I thought it all through at age 14 (after experimenting with Wicca, etc). Also, I happen to have a copy of Why I Am Not A Christian (book by Bertrand Russell) in my house, borrowed from a very very Christian friend who owned it for study purposes only. He actually has a sticky across the cover with "Spiritual poison!" written on it. He is very devout, and pretty conservative in his approach as well. I know he is Protestant but I don't know what denomination he is.

But another reason I'd love to learn more about the Bible and become more fluent in it is so that I can argue with people on a Biblical level about why x y or z might not be as they think it is within the Bible. The example I automatically think of is always the homosexuality argument -- how the Bible supposedly says it's wrong, so almost all sects of Christianity adhere to the doctrine of homosexuality as sin. In fact, the only part of the Bible that flat-out, no-other-possible-interpretation says it's wrong are the quotes from Leviticus (18:22 and the other one in 20), but I also know that for Christians this is considered old law, which was made obsolete by the coming of Jesus. Jesus gave them new laws, and, as such, Christians do not have to adhere to the Leviticus laws anymore. My conservative friend actually did not believe me when I said this, but I challenged him to give me academic proof that I was wrong and he did not. If I was SO wrong, surely he, who has been studying Christianity for far longer than I have, could have given me a source or two to prove himself, right? You would think.

The spiritual exploration has given me a new interest in religion I never had before, because, before, it was never personal in any way. Now that it's more personal, it's become a matter of wanting to figure out what I believe to be THE truth. I think my days of permanently sitting on the fence may end up being over after all of this. I have a feeling that at some point I will come to a decision about whether I do or do not believe in some sort of deity, which would obviously affect whether I would ever end up religious, or have faith, period. But I do keep an open mind (my mind is really very flexible, all things considered) and so I really will consider both sides heavily before I make a choice. I want this to be as fully informed as it can possibly be.

Spinning Compass;bt2408 said:

Also, I have noticed, that certain kinds of education is absolutely deadly to Christian faith, at least certain forms of it. I don't know your religious background, but in my experience it is those who come from a fundamentalist/evangelical/Pentecostal background where every word of the Bible is literally true who suffer the greatest crises of faith. Those who come from Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal backgrounds do not seem to experience as much conflict and cognitive dissonance, perhaps because that particular strain of Christianity is not as anti-intellectual as others. What I mean is that they seem to be able to compartmentalize better and so the crisis of faith never comes or is delayed. It can still happen. I come from a Catholic background and I am aware of the rich intellectual tradition of that church and its greater willingness to accommodate to the findings of modern science. For example, evolution is not the stumbling block that it is in more Bible-only churches, so it is possible to blend science and religion and live happily ever after. And many people do indeed take the Professor's advice to the young seeker in Why I Am No Longer A Christian and stop right there. I don't judge them. Maybe they know something I don't know, maybe they have found something I haven't found. But I can no longer combine and compromise. My journey led me further.

I say education because it was at a large state-run university that I encountered views and opinions (and not just science) that challenged my understanding of my faith as a Catholic Christian who was strongly influenced by evangelical Protestantism. I was exposed to things that neither Catholicism nor evangelical Protestantism could really give any answers to. Worse yet, I got the distinct impression that they did not want to answer these questions and they did not want me asking them. The same thing happened with the narrator of WIANLAC. In fact, many "deconverts" have similar stories to tell. It was their relentless pursuit of the truth that led them out of the faith.

So again, I am saying this as a warning. At some point you may have to decide what is important to you and what you are and are not willing to give up. I am not sure it is possible for me to return to being a "full, true Christian" because in order to do so, based on what I have seen and heard in various churches, I would have to leave my brains and education at the door. I am absolutely serious about this. The only church that I have found that welcomes and encourages seekers like me is the Unitarian-Universalist church. In all my years of church-hopping and seeking (I am in my 50's) this is the only church (other than my birth church) that I ever formally joined--and I joined it three months after my first visit. Because I knew then this was home.

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My background is actually in Catholicism, but the way Catholicism was taught to me was in an elementary school setting, in a place where we seem to have more conservative Catholics in general. For example, my friend from Buenos Aires is Catholic, and they never really had issues with gay people, etc, down in Argentina. Here, though, homosexuality as sin was basically law. I was never actually taught to interpret the Bible, not that I can remember. Of course, I also didn't know the first thing about Biblical study, which I do now thanks to my lovely Argentine Catholic friend (she will read this and know who she is!), and so I know that the Bible is MEANT to be interpreted. I do know I have never really thought that everything in the Bible should be taken literally, an example of which, for me, was the story of Adam and Eve. I mean, genetically, we could not all have come from the same 2 human beings; if we had, we'd be awfully, ridiculously inbred by now. And I know that most human beings are NOT, because there IS inbreeding (or at least was) in my province, and I know the kinds of effects it has on people, both in body and mind. Most of the world is nowhere near that.

But then I get confused again. So what parts of the Bible are literal and what are not? It's very obvious that the parables are not literal, because, well, they're parables. But what about all the stories about Abraham and Moses and all of that? And why is it that all these people could talk quite freely to God and God talked back to them, punished them, etc, yet God never seems to do so now? Quite honestly, if someone said they were seeing and talking to God in this day and age, we'd automatically put them in a psychiatric ward and treat them for schizophrenia. I know this for a fact, especially because I was in a unit once with a guy who had "delusions" about angels, and that was the reason he was there; he was a perfectly normal guy otherwise. 200 years ago, or even somewhere else in the world, he might have been called a prophet himself. But instead he ended up with a psychiatric diagnosis and on medications. So then you think, well, it's hard to know if God is talking to anyone in a world full of fakers and people who want to lock you up for claiming to see God, isn't it? But if ever God was talking, in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, everyone could see and hear him who was in the vicinity. With all the skepticism today, especially, why wouldn't God choose to talk to ANY mass groups of people nowadays? And why haven't we heard from him in hundreds and hundreds of years in a direct form? This is one thing that does not make any logical sense to me.

So... yeah. Confusion and questions and noise in my head. I honestly think the first step is to start the New Testament over, reading from my NIT Bible, because the language of King James is so markedly different (and much less accurate, as we now know, because King James edited the damn thing himself as well as it possibly having been edited before that). King James is honestly very difficult to understand; the clarity of the NIT in comparison to KJ is like comparing a scalpel to a blunt bread-cutting knife. I'll be damned if you can cut a thing with a blunt bread-cutting knife, but the scalpel allows fine, sparse slices that get to the root of things very quickly. I have honestly needed this NIT version for quite some time, though I didn't know it. Eventually I want to study it at least while looking at a copy of the very huge, heavily footnoted version of NIT; it was $55 and I simply couldn't afford that, whereas this "gift edition" NIT I have was about eight dollars. Someday, if I want to, I can visit the biggest bookstore here in the city and actually sit down with the huge, beautiful NIT I wanted so badly. Lol. The footnotes explain a lot about the translation and what words in the original might have meant, inflections inherent within the words, etc, which is endlessly useful in the study of such a heavy-duty translated document. When you're talking about the Bible, translation differences can make or break meanings, doctrines, or even faiths.

Ok, here's the rub. You say you want to know more about the Bible, so that you can hold your own in discussions. My first question is, are you fluent in Biblical Hebrew and Greek? If not, then how do you know--other than what others have told you--which translation is the most accurate? You can judge clarity, you can judge readability, but you cannot, without knowing the original language, judge accuracy. This is true of any translation of anything.

For example, I have a Chinese movie called "Legendary Amazons" which I picked up from Wal-Mart. I do not understand Chinese, but that was no problem, after all, it was dubbed into English. So I started watching the dubbed version, and just on a whim put on the subtitles as well. It was hilarious! A character would say "Go this way" and the subtitle would say "Don't go this way!" Trust this person. "Do not trust this person". Which was the most authentic version? I don't know. I'd have to get a Chinese speaker to translate.

Now, I don't think that the different translations of the Bible are as bad as my Chinese movie; they seem to be rather consistent in that one can recognize the story, although here and there you have groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses who do their own thing--Jesus being nailed to a stake rather than a cross. Nevertheless, they all are translations and if you do not know the original language you are at a serious disadvantage. That is why Muslims insist that the only way to really know the Qu'ran is to learn Arabic. They do not consider translations to have the same authority as the original Arabic; they have them, that's true, but as a concession to those who don't know Arabic. The idea is that they are a crutch, to help you while you are learning to read the Qu'ran as it ought to be read.

That beautiful NIT translation might be fine if you don't care to delve any deeper but keep in mind that you have no way of determining for yourself what the actual text is if you don't know the original language. I myself don't know Hebrew or Greek; I don't have the time, money or interest to do so. But then, I am not basing my arguments on a book that was written thousands of years ago. There was a show a few years back called "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?" Well, even considering the degraded state of American education these days, I dare say the average fifth-grader knows more about the world and how it works than a tent-maker from Tarsus who lived two thousand years ago who knew nothing of psychology, neurology, biology, chemistry, medicine--you get the picture. So basing one's arguments on the Bible is pretty shaky business. I would not want a doctor who thought that Aristotle was the last word in medicine; nor would I consult a kindergartner for advice on how to deal with life's problems (although they can come up with some pretty clever answers).

You are asking the right questions. Don't expect to get answers from other Christians as you have already found with your friend. Unless they are Biblical scholars who know the original languages, they are not going to know, and neither are you. In fact, the Bible itself ought to be labeled Spiritual Poison, because as you are already finding out from your reading, the more you know the harder it is to believe. It is not for nothing that the very first sin in the Bible is not murder or incest or rape, but the crime of wanting a certain type of knowledge. And for that--not for anything else--humanity was allegedly banished from the Garden of Eden and God had to send His Son to make right the damage.

It is provable that the whole of the Old and the New Testaments were written entirely from sources that preexisted in Egyptian and earlier traditions of spirituality. A current publication is "The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light" by Tom Harper, who was an Anglican priest and professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto. He outlines the very close similarities between, for instance, the defining events in the stories of the life of Horus in Egyptian mythology and that of Jesus Christ as written in the New Testament. The Old Testament comes from preexisting traditions also. The interpretation of those scriptures as history and biography has led humanity at large away from the real spiritual purpose of the mythology, which was to describe in detail the stages of life, from receiving a part of the universal energy at birth to realising what one is and to passing on at the end to rejoin the universal. Instead, political forces at the time of the formalisation of Christianity destroyed all mention of these things and persecuted those who had until then believed in an internal, personal Christos. The result is that a large proportion of the population of the world is divorced from their real natures and believe they can live only through an external deity if they believe anything at all.