This is the fifth part of an on-going series about my conversion to atheism. To start at the beginning, follow this link.
I went through many permutations of progressive Christianity in an effort to maintain some semblance of belief. I arrived at some interesting conclusions along the way. If the Bible wasn't the infallible word of God--which it clearly could not be--then maybe it was the fallible word of God: God's intentions filtered through the minds of error-prone humans. Maybe we were just reading it wrong. I started thinking outside the box.
The first conclusion I arrived at, one that felt like a weight being lifted off of my chest, was that there could not possibly be a Hell. According to The Bible, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The Bible also says that any who believe in Jesus will not perish but will have eternal life. Clearly, since the Bible says that everyone will believe, and whoever believes will be saved, everyone gets saved.
But wait, there's more. The Bible also says that it's not God's will that any should perish but that all should be saved. Well, clearly then, if that's God's will, then everyone is going to Heaven. Right? I mean, how else do you read it? Maybe death isn't the final judgment. That same passage says that God will be patient with us because he wants us to be saved. Maybe, after you're dead, God let's you reflect on your life and chose whether or not you want salvation.
All of this satisfied one of the questions I had never been able to answer: if Jesus is the way, the truth, the light, et al, then what about people who are not raised as Christians? Are they just shit-out-of-luck? Nope. Not according to my new-found revelation.
It also satisfied my need to be critical of the church and of the ethical inconsistencies of its policies. I realized that maybe it's not about salvation at all. Maybe it's the teachings that are important, that we can focus on the teachings of Jesus and find guidance and wisdom within them. I found a church I could attend that was seeker-friendly, it was less about Bible-thumping and forcing behavioral standards onto people than about getting together and celebrating God. Their treatment of the homosexual debate was brilliant, and it could be summed up this way: if the gay community views the Church as the enemy, the Church has done something horribly wrong. It was a remarkable thing to hear.
I started reading Marcus Borg's books about how to look at the Bible as a quest for God, not a map, and how you could still take it seriously without taking it literally. This awakened an interest in the historical Jesus, but again, the more I studied, the more I realized that there is no factual basis for even the texts of the Bible, that even the evidence for the existence of Jesus is sketchy.
So I adapted. The road-map given by God was clearly (to me) broken, but that didn't mean that God didn't exist. I reasoned that maybe it didn't matter what you believed--that the pursuit was, in and of itself, righteous. That made sense--people from all walks of life and religious backgrounds "feel the touch of God" every day. Maybe he didn't play favorites. Maybe the presence of all of these different sects meant that there was some incarnation of God for everyone. Maybe God was adapatable as well. I set out to find the right one for me.
I dabbled with Buddhism, Judaism, Vedanta, Tantra (that one was fun, if fruitless), transcendental meditation, nature-worship, and all manner of vague spiritualism. I kept coming back to the same conclusion: I couldn't intellectually defend any of the belief systems I had sampled. It was all anti-intellectual bullshit, none of it made any sense, and--most importantly--none of it was actually making my life any better. The only thing that kept me looking was a paralyzing fear of life without some kind of god.
My inability to live godlessly was eventually outmatched by my inability to consciously choose to live a lie. You see, it's not that I don't believe in God. I'm an atheist because there is no god to believe in. I'm an atheist because I spent twenty years looking for God, and if there was one, I'd have found him by now. Instead, I found the courage to live without him.
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The first conclusion I arrived at, one that felt like a weight being lifted off of my chest, was that there could not possibly be a Hell. According to The Bible, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The Bible also says that any who believe in Jesus will not perish but will have eternal life. Clearly, since the Bible says that everyone will believe, and whoever believes will be saved, everyone gets saved.
But wait, there's more. The Bible also says that it's not God's will that any should perish but that all should be saved. Well, clearly then, if that's God's will, then everyone is going to Heaven. Right? I mean, how else do you read it? Maybe death isn't the final judgment. That same passage says that God will be patient with us because he wants us to be saved. Maybe, after you're dead, God let's you reflect on your life and chose whether or not you want salvation.
All of this satisfied one of the questions I had never been able to answer: if Jesus is the way, the truth, the light, et al, then what about people who are not raised as Christians? Are they just shit-out-of-luck? Nope. Not according to my new-found revelation.
It also satisfied my need to be critical of the church and of the ethical inconsistencies of its policies. I realized that maybe it's not about salvation at all. Maybe it's the teachings that are important, that we can focus on the teachings of Jesus and find guidance and wisdom within them. I found a church I could attend that was seeker-friendly, it was less about Bible-thumping and forcing behavioral standards onto people than about getting together and celebrating God. Their treatment of the homosexual debate was brilliant, and it could be summed up this way: if the gay community views the Church as the enemy, the Church has done something horribly wrong. It was a remarkable thing to hear.
I started reading Marcus Borg's books about how to look at the Bible as a quest for God, not a map, and how you could still take it seriously without taking it literally. This awakened an interest in the historical Jesus, but again, the more I studied, the more I realized that there is no factual basis for even the texts of the Bible, that even the evidence for the existence of Jesus is sketchy.
So I adapted. The road-map given by God was clearly (to me) broken, but that didn't mean that God didn't exist. I reasoned that maybe it didn't matter what you believed--that the pursuit was, in and of itself, righteous. That made sense--people from all walks of life and religious backgrounds "feel the touch of God" every day. Maybe he didn't play favorites. Maybe the presence of all of these different sects meant that there was some incarnation of God for everyone. Maybe God was adapatable as well. I set out to find the right one for me.
I dabbled with Buddhism, Judaism, Vedanta, Tantra (that one was fun, if fruitless), transcendental meditation, nature-worship, and all manner of vague spiritualism. I kept coming back to the same conclusion: I couldn't intellectually defend any of the belief systems I had sampled. It was all anti-intellectual bullshit, none of it made any sense, and--most importantly--none of it was actually making my life any better. The only thing that kept me looking was a paralyzing fear of life without some kind of god.
My inability to live godlessly was eventually outmatched by my inability to consciously choose to live a lie. You see, it's not that I don't believe in God. I'm an atheist because there is no god to believe in. I'm an atheist because I spent twenty years looking for God, and if there was one, I'd have found him by now. Instead, I found the courage to live without him.
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