My Personal Evolution Out of Christianity

I talk more bad than good about religion and criticize more than support religious people. I do this and not very often do I talk about my own beliefs and expose myself to the same scrutiny. I'll take a moment now to talk a little about my personal evolution on matters of the spirit.

I was born and raised in the Baptist denomination of Christianity. My family originates in the south and as you know, southern Christians are perhaps the most extreme Christians. They are taught that it is a sin to "question God" that it, to challenge the Bible. Growing up, I lived half of every year in the north and half in the south. I attended school in the north and spent the rest of the year in the south, Mississippi to be specific. The southern mind state and ideas are so entrenched that when I was young, they still had the "whites only" signs up at many of the diners in town. I remember that we had to go around the back of restaurants and have our food handed to us out of the back doors of restaurants because we weren't allowed inside. I'm not that old, people. This practices should not have been taking place at that time in history but because it was so difficult for those people to accept change, the wrongfulness of their own ideas and to welcome a more evolved view of the world, they clung to the past long after those things had died and were being covered in dirt.

Their way of thinking was transported to the north by families that migrated and by evangelists who went forth to proselytize the masses. I, perhaps due to the northern citified half of myself, was always questioning the Bible. I was kicked out of Sunday School when I was about 8 years old because I asked too many questions about things in the Bible - things that the teachers had no answer for. I remember the last question I asked, the one that got me booted, was about Genesis and And & Eve. I wanted to know how, if Adam and Eve were the first and only people God created, did their sons leave and find wives in other lands outside of the area around the Garden of Eden? It was my understanding that the only people that supposedly existed were Adan, Eve and their offspring and none of them had left and it was never stated that God ever made another Adan and Eve somewhere else. None of the answers they provided sufficed and I continually debunked what they offered as answers. Eventually they decided that for the sake of the children who were willingly being programed, I should be removed.

In spite of the fact that I had been booted from Sunday School, I still considered myself a Christian. I believed wholeheartedly and I thought the answers to my questions were there in the Bible but that I hadn't yet found a person astute enough to provide me with those answers. I was Baptized in a Mississippi river in white robe, in a scene that looked like something straight out of the Bible. It would take more than a lacking Sunday School teacher to remove me from my belief. As I grew up, I only found more questions and even fewer answers. I talked to all kinds of people on all levels of the faith and still got no real satisfaction - I still didn't understand. I tried finding the answers on my own. I have read the Bible from cover to cover, a thousand times and every time I read it, I found a hundred new questions - new inconsistencies - no new answers.

When I was about 17 years old, I had a friend whom I discovered was raised a Muslim. I had no idea he was a Muslim. I had never had anyone close in my life who was not a Christian. We never talked about religion so I had just assumed he was Christian just like everybody else I knew. It wasn't until we were eating at a fast food joint one day that it caught my attention that he always ate with his right hand and he always kept his left hand beneath the table. I asked him about why he did it and he explained to me that he uses his left hand for personal sanitation (you know what I mean) therefore he never eats with it or extends it to greet people unless he means to insult them. I thought this was his personal thing until he explained further that it was part of his religious customs as a Muslim. I had never thought about other religions before. I had never considered that there were people who really didn't believe in Jesus or Christianity. He and I had a lot of religious conversations after that and I came to learn for the first time that I had options. I did not have to be a Christian if something else made better since to me. Because I grew up in a family and a church that never talked about other religions (bad or good) I didn't have any prejudices when considering another religion. I think that's why I had an open mind.

I then began studying other denominations of Christianity in the hope that perhaps the answers I sought could be found there. All I found was that they all believed pretty much the same thing, they just applied it slightly differently. They had no more answers than Baptism. The fact was that if I wanted to really know the truth, I would have to be open to changing faiths all together. I remember the day I fell to my knees and prayed - no - begged God to stop me from abandoning Christianity if I was wrong. Of course, I was not stopped, in fact, it seems that I was encouraged because within that same week, I was inundated with encounters with people of various faiths. I had never met so many people of different faiths in my life like I was then. In actuality, I was probably just paying more attention and taking more deliberate action to encounter new ways of thinking. There were so many new things for me to study at that point that I didn't know where to begin. I decided to start with Islam since I knew something about that as a result of my friendship with a Muslim. I began attending meetings at N.O.I. Masques and started reading the Koran. Eventually, I found myself in the same rut in Islam that I was in as a Christian - many questions - few answers.

Though I really appreciated the Muslim faith and the absolution that came with total surrender, my intellect was not satisfied and I had to move on. After that experience, I really opened myself up and started studying Taoism, Buddhism, Ifa Divination, Confucianism, Judaism, Hinduism, and everything I could get my hands on. The more I studied, the more I realized that there were some remarkable similarities between many faiths and many of their stories. I decided then to study the history of religion to determine if there was a connection between all of the various faiths and I discovered that most, especially the dominant faiths, are remakes or evolutions of ancient religions. Then I began studying ancient religions and found that most of them were retellings of but a few very ancient spiritual systems. Not only that but religions were instituted in most cases as societal controls in times before fully developed governments. In these times, there were only Kings and it is obvious that one person is not an adequate representative of an entire nation. In today's societies, we have hundreds of representatives and they have a hard time of adequately representing the people. It only makes since that a King would need the unquestionable backing of God himself to maintain rule.

It became clear to me that religion - especially modern religion -has little to nothing to do with God and spirituality and much more to do with keeping people under control. I then understood that if I wanted to understand God and spirituality, I would have to do it on my own - without the aid of a Bible or a Koran or a Torah or a collection of Sanskrit writings or a casting of cowries or runes or any other crutch. I would have to start from scratch. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that that is exactly what science was doing! So I started learning about and studying scientific explanations. What I learned from the scientific approach was that it believes only what is provable and challenges what is not until it is either proven true or false. I liked this because when you hold a scientific belief, it is verifiable and undeniable. What I didn't like about it was that it considered things false until proven true. Therefore, in spite of much evidence supporting the reality of a spiritual side of life, it must be considered false because it can not be placed into a test tube or beneath a microscope for examination.

Where do I stand today, after nearly 20 years of studying, challenging and questioning faith, religion and God? Here are my current beliefs though I remain open to change:

Belief:
I believe that there is a God.
Reason:
I have nothing that explains away an initial intelligence that began the process which resulted in all that there is today.

Belief:
God is not so nominal as to be concerned about the day to day lives of humanity.
Reason:
If anything I've ever read from any religion about God being an all righteous being who oversees and dictates law to man were true, there is absolutely no way that the millions of atrocities that have occurred in the history of man would have been allowed to take place.

Belief:
God is more a thing than a being.
Reason:
I believe that God is EVERYTHING: space, planets, water, stars, animals, plants, man, energy etc. I believe that the rock that exploded and formed the galaxies and all therein, was God itself and within and of that rock was all of the ingredients of life - intelligent or otherwise. Therefore the energy that we call intelligence/mind was there and for whatever reason, it chose to change and split itself into many pieces and forms.

Belief:
I believe that there is a spiritual side to life although it is as elusive to the objective side of life as is dark matter which we can see and know exists but can not prove is actually there.
Reason:
I have personally experienced and have been a witness to experiences that even my reason-loving mind had to accept as something "else" as they defy all of the known laws of objective reality.
Example 1:
One of my uncles died in a hospital before my aunt (his wife) could get there in his final moments. She arrived hours after his death and he had been pronounced dead. The sheet was over his face. When she entered the room he removed the sheet from his face and told her not to worry because he was with God. He then closed his eyes and died again. I witnessed this and not one person could explain it.
Example 2:
My mother was sick with cancer before she died. During the slow course of her moving away from this world, many strange things occurred. The day she took a turn for the very worst and had to be removed from our (her children) care at home, the very moment she screamed out, a very large shadow seemed to move across the house and the house lost all power. When we checked the circuit breakers, none of them had been tripped. When the paramedics arrived, the power restored itself. Then on the day before her passing, I and my siblings were seated around her bedside at the hospital, watching her regress through her own life before our eyes to a point where she believed that she was a child again and no longer recognized us. Then suddenly she reached her hand out and tried to lift herself from her bed, something she should not have been capable of doing in her condition, before collapsing back on the bed and covering eyes as if blocking a bright light. She declared out loud, "You know you have to come closer Lord...you know I can't reach you". The next day, the day of her passing, at the exact moment of her passing, all of her children including myself got sick and vomited just before receiving the call advising us that she had passed.
I have witnessed or experienced many more strange things - enough to leave me convinced that there is "something" else.

Belief:
I believe that man is governed by his/her own conscience - not God.
Reason:
Because I believe God to not be some ego-persona roaming around meddling in the affairs of what to him must be microscopic germs (us), I believe the quality of our lives is determined by us and us alone.

Belief:
I believe that the purpose of life is for us to give it a purpose.
Reason:
Without us - intellectual reasoning beings, there appears to be no other point to anything. Our job is to determine what life should be and it doesn't appear to matter if we make a choice of wickedness or righteousness, wisdom or ignorance. We have free reign to do with this life, whatever we want and no one will stop us but us. Remember; it wasn't God that stopped Hitler - we did.

Anyway - I think you can see where I'm going and can probably extrapolate from the beliefs I've outlined, what else I might believe. So, there ya go. Have at me.