Jazzns' History of Belief

I have spent the last year and a half of my life going though and documenting a change in my personal beliefs. I feel that this forum and the people who make up this community have had a lot to do with my transformation so I thought I would share something with you all that I have been working on for the better part of a year.For a year's worth of writing it is not that much but it represents a good deal of soul searching and thought about the right way to say what I want. What I would like to do is post a series of messages that are a first draft of my very meager manifesto.I am open to criticism on matters of fact, reasoning, or even style. (Some of it still seem awkward and wordy to me) Part of the reason that I want to share this with you all is that I feel a large part of me has been sharpened by my experiences here. Even though I have a lot of investment in what I have so far, it would be anathema to resist criticism of my beliefs when it is precisely that which I credit for helping me achieve much clarity in my life.Nothing I have "discovered" is different than what lots of people here have already talked about at length so I hope this isn't too boring. This is just a story about how my struggle with faith has unfolded in my life and I hope others find it interesting and/or useful.So I have 10 sections which I hope will help with narrowing the scope of any responses. Admins, I would like to put this in Faith & Belief but please wait until I have the subsequent sections posted so that they are not broken up within the thread.

This is a story and statement of my beliefs. I am writing this as a message for my children and to elucidate to myself my reasons for coming to the conclusions that I have. I believe that I am in a genuine moment of inflection in my life and I want to capture my state of mind so that I can share it. I don't know of a better way to bring these issue up with the people I care about who have not been with me on this journey. This is a part of me, concerning my personal faith, that I have only shared with people in small amounts over time. A big reason for this lack of openness has been the degree of my own uncertainty. Far from now being certain, I have learned to embrace uncertainty and I hope that those who read this will find value in my story.While much of the description of my history is a tale of the loss of faith, I only want to express those sentiments as background for what I now believe. No one thinks for themselves all the time and the hard work of casting off false ideas that you were raised with should not ultimately define a person. Where I am now is necessarily a reflection of the history of my life but I don't want the negative or rejectionist tale to define the positive ideals I now hold dear. Just as light is most distinct against darkness, the rise of my new understanding is cast against my departure from faith. This is therefore story of how I found truth in my life

I have had a mottled history with faith and religion throughout my life. I consider the transformative part of my journey to have begun back when I left the church where my religious faith had originally been strongest. I had joined this church with two very close friends at a moment in my life when I was torn between the Christianity of my mother and Islam of my father. I had a significant exposure to Christianity growing up but I never truly accepted the notion that a man could be a God. That was because of the push back I had from my father and the small amount of Islam he promoted in our lives. My mother and father survived by mostly limiting their difference to the issue of the divinity of Jesus. The choice for us kids than became not a question of belief or non-belief but one of which particular Abrahamic faith we would accept. In the end I let myself be convinced, peer pressure and the desire to fit in at its finest, that my reservations about Christ were unfounded. Despite the divisiveness of having these two religions in the home growing up, I had finally chosen Christianity over Islam, been baptized, and decided to try to live in that religion.What I didn't realize at the time is that I was a "follower" in the true sense of the word. The circumstances dictated my growth into religion and not my true inner desire for spiritual truth. That desire did grow in me but only after I had been convinced of the value of salvation for other reasons. Of course I didn't realize this at the time and something always felt like it was holding me back. A certain amount of doubt was ever present in my life and it was absolutely agonizing for me. While everyone around me was seemingly filled with satisfaction, I was left wanting. I had an enormous amount of guilt over this, thinking that it was my fault that God would not bless me because of some mental or spiritual block that I was putting up. I prayed for God to remove my doubt, or tolerate it to the point that I could get past it. It seemed so easy for everyone else and yet there I stood in a church, my hands up in the air, asking God for the same feeling as the people around me, getting nothing, and feeling like I was the only one to blame. I don't think I have felt more alone in my life despite the fact that I was surrounded by people.For various reasons, the church and the circumstances that led me to it fell apart. I also fell apart because I was a person who almost entirely lacked the confidence to stand on my own. It was a true consequence of feeling that I needed to have religion to be whole and the lack of certainty to declare that I had in fact found it on my own. In the aftermath, I was still somewhat religious but I was looking for a new outlet for my faith that I never really found. Looking back, I know that the only real reason I was there was because of my friends and an admiration for the pastor and the people. I wanted to believe it was because I had made the choice but I never took the time to have the knowledge that I would need to feel such confidence. I didn't have an appreciation for my own sentience or what I would require to be so sure of something like my eternal fate. Other people seemed to have no problem accepting God and being blessed by him without the necessity of all these minutia. Why then was it so necessary for me? The inability to answer that question would take me into the wilderness for awhile.With a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance, I began to live what looking back I perceive as a pretty tame secular existence. I made new friends and began to live life a little. I grew some social confidence and finally broke out of my shell. I met my wife and she became the new focus of my life. I always imagined that I would bring religion back into prominence in my life. I even fantasized about my perfect life, raising my kids in church, and sharing a God approved marriage with the woman I love. It was always a "someday" kind of thing and I was enjoying the good things that were happening in my life too much to worry about committing to the search for religious truth. I used school and the overall busyness of life as an excuse as to why I didn't pursue my religious desires any harder. I had a few episodes of profound isolation and guilt over not pursuing my faith harder. In a particularly desperate moment in my life I made the one prayer that I consider to be the most sincere I have ever made. I prayed for God to show me the truth of the reality of our existence even if it is what I didn't want to believe. I prayed for him to make me see the truth. Of course at the time my crisis it had more to do with what flavor of religion I should have but it is somewhat ironic that I feel that this is the only prayer I ever prayed that has been answered. I continued on somewhat haphazardly with my life leaving much of my spiritual existence in limbo. It is unfortunate that outside factors would be needed once again to motivate me into examine my own faith at the level of sophistication needed to resolve my issues. I would be much more pleased with myself had I been self-motivated to make a decision about my beliefs.

A friend of mine became interested in young earth creationism, this idea that the world is only 6000 years old and that we are all literally the product of God speaking us into existence in 6 days. I had always enjoyed science enough to know that those ideas were bogus and as part of a number of discussions I sought to show that having faith in God didn't require us to believe in nonsense. To me, God was not a liar or a trickster or a magician. If we discovered something cool about our world, the default assumption was that it must be compatible with God. That is what I truly believed.I always liked science and I already knew a fair bit about geology and the reasons that we know the world is as old as it is. The spirit of debate excited me and I soaked up information about everything concerning the creationism controversy. I immediately found varieties of Christians who found a way to reconcile scientific fact with their religion. I joined an on-line form where I debated with people to represent what I thought was a sensible position, that you didn't have to believe in untenable literalism to be a Christian. I had minor mission in life to be a beacon of moderation and sensibility. I felt that I was finally beginning to stake a claim to an ideology that I could own.I was never a literalist to begin with which helped. Even in the moments of my most conservative belief I always thought there was room for interpretation in the Bible. For example, I always thought the Genesis story was a close enough allegory to science fact that it didn't bother me. To me, Genesis was the equivalent of a parable that God used to explain our origins and the consequences of our free will. I began to create finer distinctions of what I felt were allegory in the Bible so that I could ally what I knew were the two truths of my life, the real world and the word of God.

The fire had been lit in my brain but during the course of my personal journey I discovered there were things that I couldn't quite reconcile by saying it was an allegory. Prior to this chain of discovery, the Old Testament of the Bible had remained an enigma to me. It is very hard to read and my only real exposure to it was the occasional sections read by pastors during church. Besides, I always thought the New Testament was more important anyway. Yet as I studied it, I realized that the Old Testament is actually nothing to be revered at all. There are truly disturbing accounts of ridiculously improbable wars where actions are taken, ordained by God, that are beyond sadistic. The character of God in the Old Testament is nothing like the character of God that I was raised to believe in or taught to love in church.Parts of the New Testament bothered me the more I looked at it as well. The denigration and subservience of women, the bi-polar legalism of Paul's letters, and the psychotic bonanza of the Book of Revelations in particular were places I really had some doubts about. Why was my long hair a problem? Why were women not permitted to preach? What parts of the old Jewish laws are really relevant for us today? It was a lot of the specifics that bothered me but the bigger picture of why those ideas were in the Bible to begin with was something I really wanted to understand. I had some very specific questions I wanted answers to concerning why certain things were in the Bible which drove my exploration going forward.The less evangelical I became in my belief, the more I became dedicated to resolving the problems I had with the Bible. It was somewhat counter intuitive that this search made me more and more devoted to studying the Bible. I came to the conclusion that some parts of the Bible must not be right which is, unsurprisingly, a conclusion come to by many over the course of history. One of my historical heroes, Thomas Jefferson, even wrote his own Bible by excising the things he thought were wrong. I don't know why the mental step of accepting the deficiencies of the Bible was so hard to take given the fact that it has been so extensively written about from both a theological and academic perspective. It took me so long to go "that far" that I feel a little bit embarrassed about how close minded I was at that time. It seems like anyone who has studied the Bible text with any sincerity has come to the conclusion that some parts of it are at least discordant amongst translations. Yet for me this was one of the most heart wrenching things to accept.I became increasingly fascinated with the origins of the Bible itself. If it really did contain God's word, how was it that so many churches used so many Bibles over the history of the religion and why? Why was Paul so prominent in the New Testament compared to the main figures in the gospels who were explicitly tasked to spread the word of God? Why were some books excluded from the Bible and under whose authority they were dismissed? Here there seemed to be some hope for salvaging my faith. Perhaps parts of the Bible were true only to be diluted and altered by human institutional religion. Obviously God allows false and distorted religions to exist or else why would we have so many mutually exclusive theologies even within Christianity? My task was to figure out what was real and what was not. How naive I was back then thinking that this was in any way an original idea.It took awhile for me to really hit my stride in this task of separating the good from the bad. I shunned church, to the dismay of my mother, because I conceived that institutional religion was the reason for the distortion of the Bible to begin with. I guess you could say that I became somewhat of an anti-establishment Christian during that time.I learned more and more about the history of the Christian church and the writing of the Bible. Over many years, a very gradual change came about as I learned more and more about how accidental and how human a process the whole construction of my religion was. Never once did I have an instantaneous life altering change. I simply took each small piece of what I believed and moved it into the "untrue" pile one by one as I discovered the very un-supernatural origins of each concept. I learned about the massive diversity of Bible manuscripts that include edits to even the gospels, the books I thought certainly would be central to any remaining truth. Sure enough, the writings of Paul were confusing because they in fact were not all written by Paul. Worst of all, these things have been known for hundreds of years and yet seem wholly inaccessible from within the confines of a church. Anytime I had ever heard 2 Timothy, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness," there was never someone to put near an asterisk, "likely written by some anonymous person who falsely attributed it to Paul." Nothing was untainted and at some point if completely failed to shock me when I discovered how blatant some of the distortions were.

My knowledge continued to accumulate over time as I sought new sources of scholarship. At some point, not on any particular date or time, very undramatically, I simply noticed that my faith was in ashes. There was literally nothing left of what I had more than once nearly destroyed my personal happiness to hold onto. Still, I could not call myself an unbeliever. For the most part, it didn't really matter anymore. No part of my life outside this personal issue was affected by my belief or disbelief. I put up as much of a charade about my faith as was necessary when it came up because I mostly didn't know what else to say.Throughout all this, as I was losing my faith, I was gaining in something else. I fell in love with the search for knowledge and truth. I learned how to look at the world with wonder for how complex and beautiful it is. The fact that the world is not a product of some divine imagination, yet is the way it is, makes it all that more amazing when you consider it. As one of my favorite authors puts it, once you understand the history of our universe you realize that we are all literally made of star stuff.In fact, the zest for the true wonder of the world is responsible for all the things I truly care about. People who fundamentally care about the truth of reality are responsible for nearly everything important in my life. Modern medicine allowed me to exist and has saved the life of many people who I love. The infrastructure of information that allowed me to easily inform myself about religion, science, skepticism, theology, and philosophy is the product of the forces of society that embraces knowledge. The career and middle class success I enjoy is a side effect of the technological boom we have experienced in our generation. It wasn't divine American Exceptionalism that caused that. It was the direct result of our society taking a reality based approach to the problems we face. A holy book or religious experience did not drive us to build the computer. We needed to solve real problems in this world so we asked important questions and slowly drove to find real answers. The benefit of all that is now we can look into the sky knowing what stars are and that they do not in fact fall. We do not operate day to day with the worry that the way we think or feel is going to influence the clouds or the seasons we depend on for our survival.Everything that I have ever accomplished personally is also a result of my confrontation with reality. Becoming educated requires a recognition that knowledge is not gained by praying for it. When I so greatly desired companionship, it was the fundamental recognition that I was going to have to do something to meet people. God was not going to drop my soul mate into my lap. There is in fact no such thing as a "soul mate" above what we choose invest into our relationships. If someone was to ever think that this somehow dilutes love I would claim just the opposite. How much more valuable is a love that you sincerely worked to build than one supposedly ordained by authority.

As I look back on the Bible now, I see it as expressing a fundamentally anti-reality world view. By this I mean something much more than the mythology of the stories such as a half million people dying in battle, something that has never happened even with modern weapons of mass destruction. I mean that the lessons expressed teach us exactly to reject reality. The entire point of the stories of exile or of Jesus' ministry revolve around the idea that mankind and the world we live in are fatally flawed to the point that we cannot rescue ourselves. Rather than face our challenges, we are to simply do the best we can to get by until we are redeemed by an outside force on his time frame.This flies directly in the face of the history of humanity. People have lived for generations in dire oppression to one day rise up and free themselves. Tyrants, monarchs, and warlords have been toppled by the will of the people. We have eradicated entire diseases, learned how to feed populations of billions, and traveled to other worlds because countless people dedicated their lives to lifting humanity up from the dredges of its ignorance. The sentiment in the Bible, that we are fallen and helpless, is a defeatist and narcissistic philosophy born from the theological crisis of a conquered people.Also, when you look at the practice of Christianity you find a disconnect with this sentiment that we should be waiting for salvation. Battling for human rights, institutionalizing marriage, and generally working for the future are fundamentally against the notion that we get from Jesus and Paul. According to them, our destiny is to be beat down by the powers of the world. We are not to build wealth and in fact if we do, we are instead destined for damnation. It is better if we don't get married because it would be a distraction from preparing for our impending salvation. To them, no actions that we could take will improve our position in this world and moreover, wanting to improve our material position is considered a sin. We are supposed to rejoice in our suffering as a symbol of our rejection of the real world. Helpless, we are to give up everything to wait for the institution of the kingdom of God.Really this is how I feel I was indoctrinated and kept in the faith to begin with. It was all about fear. The people I love and look up to the most endorsed the idea that I would burn eternally in a lake of fire if I didn't believe in God. Sure there was also the "do unto others" and various life affirming things that they associated with religion but it was at least somewhat motivated by the notion that God was "watching" and not necessarily for any intrinsic value. What possible response is there for a person, unable to reason though the alternatives, to the choice of eternal torture or redemption? How profound is it as a parent who believes in this dichotomy to have to offer such a choice to their beloved children? That is why I don't harbor blame for my circumstances against anyone. The fault is against an idea that was generated and refined over thousands of years to be a powerful, self-perpetuating meme.

There are countless things that an apologist could say to combat the condensation of the dogma of Christianity that I just gave. Yet in nearly every case, the basis for their nuance is a pile of disparate tomes that are claimed to represent a unified accord of faith. Never is there a mention that these really are all just orthodox opinions that happened to survive the ideological culling that took place over centuries of the sectarian conflicts of early Christianity. The most revealing thing I have learned throughout all of this searching for truth is that there is and never was any Bible. There is no God inspired and protected text of instructions for life. The book that inspired my family to implicitly threaten their children with eternal punishment, that generated an endless supply of guilt and shame in my life, and that tears divisions through humanity over imagined discord is all a sham.All of the books that describe the ministry of Jesus are flawed. From the core, the gospels are decades removed from the events they are claimed to be eyewitness accounts of. They disagree with each other in a number of ways which is not surprising given that they were written by different sects of early Christianity. Half of the books supposedly written by Paul are forgeries along with a list of other theologically vital books such as Daniel. The other books from Paul are admittedly by a man who never met Jesus except in a vision. He admits to being in conflict with other branches of Christianity and invents articles of faith to deal with situations faced by the early church that have no basis in the gospels and with no authority other than his say so. We have a name for people who fit this description in our day and age. We call them cult leaders.All off the books of the New Testament have been subsequently pruned, added to, shuffled, and displaced by the sect of Christianity that happened to win the ideological wars centuries after Jesus died. Other books that were from different branches of Christianity were systematically repressed and destroyed by the command of men for not matching their particular orthodoxy. The resulting canon is actually a product of a formal information repression campaign by the leaders of the early church.Throughout my search I have not once found any evidence of the hand of God protecting any particular core truth through these processes. I used to think that it could be that it is buried amidst all the various changes and distortions. I also conceived that perhaps God intended the changes to happen the way that they did in order to produce the final result that he had in mind. In the end, I had to let go. Any God that would deserve my reverence would not hide in plain sight in this manner. If there is no way to distinguish between the hand of God and the self-serving hand of man, then the need to find the difference is lost.I will never dispute that some people can and do create a representation of Christianity that usefully accepts the parts of the Bible that are affirming. Unfortunately, that you can derive a handy philosophy from it all does not speak to the truth of it. That others can equally derive a destructive philosophy using a similar process only serves to reinforce to me the bankruptcy of using a haphazardly assembled religion as a basis for what we should value today.

So I admit that I was immature back in my days of belief. I admit that I had doubts and insecurities about God. Someone might say that it was those things that prevented me from growing rather than falling from the from the faith. The problem I have with this is the idea that some minor and likely common character flaws would ultimately be responsible for my eternal damnation. Is that truly the reality that we must accept? Does God not tolerate doubt? In the face of someone trying to seek their way to salvation, does God not help them find their way?These questions are also at the heart of the theological quandary often presented to Christians about the expectation of salvation for the people who were half a world away from Jerusalem when Jesus died. Do they have a different path for salvation? Why then do I, specifically seeking for the truth of God, need to meet a higher standard? Does being separated in time and space weight against me in this automatic indictment of my life? Actually, when you look at the multitude of answers in this vein of questioning you find a disturbing diversity among them. From an objective perspective, it really does seem that no one knows what the exact requirements for salvation are. A fairly common answer seems to be that only God can know. The flip side of this that no one seems to notice is that this is the same as saying that we can never know.The extreme response to this comes from Calvinism which teaches that not only can we not know but also that we have no power to change our fate! It forces a faithful person to decide that either our salvation is predestined or that God is not in fact omniscient about the future. Granted, many people of faith probably do not get so philosophical when thinking about their religion but this is something that conflicted me quite sincerely. Although this is initially a very frightening concept, if you think about it deeply it actually proves to be quite liberating. If it is true that there is literally no way to affect your salvation, then there should be absolutely nothing stopping you from living your life as if the dilemma did not exist at all.When the consequences are as dichotomous as eternal happiness versus suffering, why is this such an ambiguous situation? I ultimately reject the notion that some supreme being would torture me for all eternity for not being quite good enough at seeking his approval. If such a being did truly exist, it is not a being we ought to worship.Luckily, my main defense against the notion that I just didn't have the right commitment in order to find truth in religion does not solely rest upon my ability to definitively answer the theological quandaries that have plagued men for centuries. My weakness, doubt, and insecurities put me on this particular path but it is the volume of positive discoveries that I made while walking it that has led me away from faith. An infinite amount of strength, trust, and confidence would not change the knowledge I now have about the providence of the religion of Christianity. No amount of conviction erases the incompatibility of the Bible with reality. No degree of reverence would allow me to accept the web of caveats and explanations necessary to un-contradict its literary and moral failings.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

I didn't really think about the issue of other religions until I was writing this. I don't feel the need to examine Islam, Buddhism, etc because I don't particularly feel anything missing in my life that they could possibly provide. In my search for the truth I discovered peace in the searching. If other religions do contain truth, it ought to be apparent in our new world with such an open marketplace of ideas. Perhaps someday my spiritual needs will change and I will once again seek religion but I doubt it very much. For now, there is an endless amount of known real things in this world that spark my curiosity for learning and I believe that I can fill a lifetime pursuing them.So here I am, without a religion and with very few people to talk to about it. It is easier to talk to people other than my family about it because I am afraid of what they might think. That is the current state of things as I am writing this. A big part of me wants to just keep it to myself because I don't really see the need to stress out my parents and grandparents about it. I am not going to change them and I don't see any value in doing so. If I can't change them, they will only experience emotional pain in their belief that I am "lost". At the same time, I am certainly struggling with the notion that this will likely require me to lie to them.Even though I might be able to make it for awhile with my elders I don't think I can continue like this with the parts of my family that are in my own generation. I am certainly not ashamed of my current state of belief. I just don't know how to deal with putting it out there. There is a mountain of history regarding the reasons for what I now believe that are only summarized in this letter.

I don't want to just come out and say that I am an atheist because I absolutely do not resonate with that label. People do have differing opinions on this but to me, I feel it is defining myself by what I don't believe when I would much rather define myself by what I DO believe. I reject the need to label myself by the absence of something in my heart and mind. It flies against the reason I feel I was trapped by religion to begin with, that I believed I needed to have faith in something or else I was incomplete. I did not just simply fall out of a particular faith and go on to deny all rest. That might describe my journey but it does not describe my current state of belief. I fundamentally reject the need to have faith in anything at all.What I do believe is that we as people need to focus on this world, this life, in this moment. This is a common and beautiful sentiment that has been expressed by many people throughout history. It has been emblazoned in song and poetry not the least of which is the simple Epicurean motto, "carpe diem". In a beautiful mix of mysticism and skepticism, the whole quote is:

quote:

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Don't ask what end the gods have granted to me or you, Leuconoe.

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Don't play with Babylonian fortune-telling either.

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How much better it is to endure whatever will be!

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Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one

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which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the rocks placed opposite

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Be wise, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes to a short period.

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While we speak, envious time will have already fled.

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Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.

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I am careful not to accept the Epicurean model fully. We do need to have an eye on the future but I think it is important not to let that overwhelm our sense of value about today. "Today" for me also means the current state of our world. To throw that away simply to take pleasures in the moment is just as defeatist as waiting around for God to deal with our problems. The value and pleasure of today also means that we have time for good work. That can mean striving to solve a social problem, fighting to improve your health and your body, studying diligently to fill your mind, building a home to nurture your family, and countless other worthy investments of our precious time.Love for the moment also means accepting a value for life that is intrinsic. We do not need a higher power to imbue us with an appreciation for life and the continuation of it. It is what defines life and we should not shirk from that innate sense of importance. We do not need to apologize for being human. By virtue of our sentience, I believe that humans have a special role to serve in our universe as observers and stewards of it for as long as we can. I don't know what it means for the universe to exist without us there to appreciate it but it saddens me to think about it. That means in the short term that we need to eliminate war and other similar venues of human suffering. Only then can humanity as a whole come together to solve the problems that face our sustainability as a species. We should do as life does everywhere, expand and fill the void in other places in our universe.Whatever word exists to describe those positive beliefs is what I am. I will not be defined as a disbeliever of the multitude of imaginary ideas that mankind has produced over the vastness of our existence. I am simply a believer of the truth.

Thats the end. If everything is okay, moderators please post in Faith and Belief or where else you might think is appropriate.Thanks

Thread copied here from the Jazzns' History of Belief thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I really enjoyed your well written well thought out story to where you are today. In the last ten years I took a similar approach and came to many of the same conclusions as you, but also some different ones.I have retained my Christian faith although a much modified version of it. I really agree with you that there are many inconsistencies in the Bible if we understand it as a book dictated by God. I now see it as a history of the Hebrew people as told with the cultural and personal conditioning that would go into that. I think that Christians in many cases, although they would never admit it, wind up worshipping the Bible.Thanks for openly posting your thoughts. Lots to think about.One thing that we can likely agree on is Micah 6:8:He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.In the end it's pretty simple eh?

You can always say "I am non-religious" or "I prefer to keep my religious views private," depending on whom you are talking to.Thanks for sharing. Yes, very well said.