Coming out of the Closet - The Fallout

This is specifically addressed to the person who responded to my blog post and decided to set up a blog themselves to show me the evil of my ways. You can see what they did here. I find it interesting that the person would call his blog "Beginning at Moses". Considering Moses was the lawgiver, you can see where the person is coming from: legalism and definitely NOT grace.

Dear sir,

Unless one has spent the time reading all the books on church history, origins of christianity, religious studies, and watched the hundreds of hours worth of documentaries that we have, then one really can't comment by saying "no contradiction" in one or more blog posts. Once you have read our list of books – and maybe come to a different conclusion, then we can possibly communicate. Then, perhaps, only then can we talk. I know where you are coming from. I’ve been where you are and changed. Yet, you do not know where I am coming from. Until you have walked in my shoes we cannot have a rational discussion about this. I cannot go back to where I was. If you see no contradictions, that's fine. I, for one, do.

The comment “bravo” was meant in the original context of the word, “brave” as my husband was proud of me for having the guts to actually speak my mind. I knew the potential consequences and I did it anyway. Because I’ve read dozens and dozens of books on these subjects, it’s hard for me to articulate in an abbreviated space what these authors have said in volumes.

It's well known in academic circles that Paul never wrote II Timothy. It’s generally agreed that Paul’s genuine works are: Romans, I & II Corinthians, I Thessalonians, Galatians and Philippians. Most Bible Colleges, supposedly, teach that (but the pastors NEVER tell their congregation that). Please see The First Paul by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus J. Borg. The rest were written “in his name” but not by Paul himself. Today we would call that plagiarism, but no one had issues about it back in the first century. In legal terms, he would have no subject matter jurisdiction to do a raid on the people of Damascus. It was out of his jurisdiction and he had no authority there. I know there are contradictory statements in Acts about Paul’s conversion experience and what Paul says happened in his letters, but I can’t find what book that was in. I think it was The First Paul I mentioned above. Paul was from Tarsus, a seat of the Mithas cult. (Tarsus/Taurus both meaning “the bull.”) I’ve read convincing arguments that what Paul was doing was basically rewriting the Greek mystery religions for Jews and that he was no Pharisee. No Jew would EVER have drunk blood – it was forbidden in the book of Leviticus. Jesus NEVER would have said, “This is my blood...” as Paul claims - even if it was meant as a symbol. I was stunned when I read that. I should have known that all along. It seemed so obvious to me when I saw it before me, but why hadn’t I seen it before? Even you can’t refute that drinking blood was forbidden to the Hebrews.

I'm not saying I know it all - heck no. I'm not saying I'm smarter than anyone else. I challenged what I believed - and found it sorely wanting. If you challenge yourself, and it stands, I'm happy for you. For me, the Bible that I thought I knew (and I thought I knew it well) didn't stand up to too much scrutiny. It bothers me that something like Jesus' divinity came down to a vote – by someone like Constantine who had an agenda for political control. Some archaeological digs do support some things about the bible - some don't. It's estimated by the Jesus seminar that up to 84% of what we are told about him in the Bible never happened. And, how do you reconcile the stories of Mithras, Adonis, Attis that all pre-dated Christ by hundreds of years, or are you going to side with the church fathers who said the devil went back in time and planted the story? Surely you must see how ridiculous that claim is. But before judging me, go read them for yourself. James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” also retells some of those myths. If you are content with believing that only one of those is history and the others are simply myth, that's all right. I, personally, had to be honest with myself and say I couldn't accept that. The stories are too close to be coincidence. Go and do some research on the cult of Mithras. You should be shocked at what you find and how much christianity stole from it.

These men and women who talk about the contradictions I’ve mentioned have spent their lifetimes doing this work. A lot are people like Bart D. Ehrman, a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and was (In his own words) "a committed Bible believing christian" and was "certain that the Bible, down to its very words, had been inspired by God. Maybe that’s what drove my intense study… Surely knowing them intimately was the most important thing in life.” Some are like John Shelby Spong, Episcopal Bishop of Newark for many years before his retirement. Unless you have put in the hours and years of study that these – and other - men have, you can’t just simply dismiss them. To say that, “the heart of all Biblical challenge is spiritual unbelief, not intellectual incompatibility, though the latter is often sited and held onto for dear life, ironic as that is, by those who professing themselves to be wise have become fools” is pompous and arrogant on your part – when you have not walked in these men’s shoes. You do not know them, nor the journeys they took. How dare you be so self-righteous that you would call them deceived by the devil. You should at least listen to what they have to say. How dare you say they don’t know what they are talking about and that their research does not stand. The fact is you say that because you don't want the research to stand, and not because you know anything about them or their work. Your opinion is formed in sheer and utter ignorance. You’ve never read what they’ve said, nor read the manuscripts they have. Once you have, then you can form an opinion. Until then, you have no right to speak.

The genealogies in Matthew and Luke are NOT sound, and I quote Mr. Ehrman, “Matthew left out some names in the fourteen generations from David to the Babylonian disaster. In 1:8, he indicates that Joram is the father of Uzziah. But we know from I Chronicles 3:10-12 that Joram was not Uzziah’s father, but his great-grandfather. In other words, Matthew has dropped three generations from his genealogy.”

Do I know what happens when we die? No. And if you were honest, you don’t know either. You believe something. Belief and knowledge are two quite different things. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is all there is, but I don’t know.

I find your accusation that I am a “dead soul” very insulting, especially when you don’t know me. In fact, I find myself in a far happier place spiritually and more healthy emotionally and a more tolerant and gracious person now than when I was a Bible believing christian. I look back on the person I was then with shame. I now consider myself a “gracist” and believe that “if it pleases you to please the Lord, then you can please yourself” and I won’t question it. I would just hope that I would receive the same from you. When you spoke of churches “dummying down” I do understand what you are talking about. Now that I see things differently, I want to chew on some meat and not the milk I was fed at church. I now read the academic stuff; the books one reads in upper level theology classes. I find the stuff one finds at the average christian bookstore much too dummied down for my liking and trite. I consider myself fairly well read, and fairly intelligent – though my academic career is nothing compared to a lot of people. Heck, all I have is a one year Bible Certificate, my paralegal certificate and a love of reading and learning.

When I was in Bible College, we had a teacher that said that when he was a pastor, his goal was to work himself out of a job – to get the congregation to the place where he wasn’t needed anymore. I remember thinking how brilliant that was of him. As time goes on, I think more of him for it. To bring a person to the point in their (spiritual) life where they can stand on their own should be the goal. I don’t know what psychology you may or may not have studied, but when a person goes for counseling, they can develop “transference” and it’s up to the counselor/psychologist to make sure that transference – as painful as it may be for the patient – is broken. The movie “Holy Smoke” with Kate Winslet portrays it quite graphically. Kate’s cult deprogrammer, Harvey Keitel, in order to break transference slaps her across the face in order to force her to break from him. Perhaps those that have left the church have broken the transference and have the ability to stand on our own. Perhaps it’s us who “saw through a glass darkly, but now face to face.” My walk is my walk – and yours is yours. Surely after all this time you don’t need someone to tell you how to live your spiritual life. I have a theory that those who are still in the church are still afraid of their father (be it heavenly or earthly) and are too scared to stand on their own and need someone to tell them what to do. Once they grow up and are a little more spiritually mature, they, in theory, should no longer need that. God wants us to be spiritual adults – not simpering, whimpering, cowering children. He gave us brains for a reason: to use them to think. He didn’t make us robots.

As for Genesis, I know of a pastor in the C&MA church who doesn’t think there was a literal tree in a literal garden. I didn’t understand him at the time, but I do now. Are you going to say he’s going to hell for that because you see something different?

As for Judas, I suggest that you try and find a copy of “Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil” by Hyam Maccoby. It’s out of print now, but I was fortunate enough to get a copy a few years ago at a reasonable price. His basic premise is that christians used the character of Judas as an excuse to propagate 2000 years worth of atrocities on the Jews. Actually, it would appear that Andrew Lloyd Webber got it right in his musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” where Jesus tells Judas before the betrayal to (I’m paraphrasing) “wear the black cloak with pride”. The recently discovered Gospel of Judas seems to verify that. If Jesus was solely a spiritual leader, and had nothing to do with politics, why do as many as five of his disciples have ties to political groups (Judas Iscariot being one of them, Simon the Zealot being another). That figure of up to five I remember being told back in my NT class at Northwest Baptist. Are you going to say that he was wrong, too and/or just dismiss it because you don’t agree? Speaking of the disciples, can you even name all twelve? There are contradictions in those lists, too, depending on which gospel you read.

In the words of Steve Martin, “You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies." I would also say that there are a lot of life’s riddles answered in books. You need to do more reading – far more than what you can find in your christian bookstore. You need to read books that were written by Jewish scholars like Hyam Maccoby. After all, Jesus was Jewish and who better would understand Jewish culture than a Jew? You need to read books written by academics – real academics from real universities like Harvard, Princeton and Yale, not some bible-paper-mill. People like Elaine Pagels, Bart D. Ehrman, etc. The more you learn, the more you will find you don’t know – and that’s the beginning of wisdom: admitting you don’t know. The word virgin did NOT mean a young woman that had not had sex; it meant maiden, an unmarried young woman. It was mistranslated. If Jeconiah was so evil that God took the throne away from his descendants, then why did God promise David that his throne would be established forever? (II Samuel 7:11-16) Isn’t God contradicting himself, which God supposedly cannot do?

If you are going to say that God cursed Jeconiah and took the throne away from him because he was so evil, then do you condone the horrors of slavery that were imposed on Africans by their christian “massers” because Ham was cursed by Noah, and Africans are (supposedly) his descendants? That was the justification that “good Christian white folk” used. Are you saying that the estimated nine million Africans that died on slave ships en route to America somehow got what they deserved because of something that supposedly happened several thousand years before? Are you going to condone witch trials because all women were cursed through Eve? Are you saying the pogroms and the holocaust were justified because the Jews supposedly rejected Jesus? Surely to be consistent, you must.

If someone from the 15th or 16th Century were to time travel to our time and tell us that the earth was flat and it was the centre of the universe, would we believe him? No. Science has proven that’s not true. If he was to tell us that animals are “automatons” and feel no pain, would we believe him? No. (I find it hard to believe that someone as intelligent as Rene Descartes would say something so stupid). Would we believe him if he said that you couldn’t trust a woman’s word in court simply because she was a woman? No. Would we believe him if he said a woman must be a witch because he came down with a head cold after seeing her in the street (or some such nonsense?) No. Then why would we trust anything he would have to say about religion and the authority of the church? That would also go for the London Baptist confession of faith, too.

My hope lies in the fact that, if there is a god, he will not cast anyone out who genuinely seeks truth. I want to know who the historical Jesus was. I want to know, so much that I am willing to go beyond the borders of the playground I was told was safe to play in to find out who he was. Short of going back in time, the best I can do is read about him. No doubt he is disgusted, as I am, at the atrocities that have been – and still are committed in his name. Most recent of which is the Iraq war which President Bush said was to “avert Gog and Magog” and Sarah Palin called, “A Mission from God.” My hope does not rest in a two thousand year old book that that’s unreliable as history and science and contradicts itself. I believe Luther was onto something when he said, “faith alone” but I don’t take everything he says as true as it’s well known he was a raging anti-semite, so that taints some of his sayings which coincides with what I said in the previous paragraph.

How can I explain how it changes lives? Easy. It’s because deep within us, we passionately want to believe that we are important to God. It reaches deep into our psyche, something very primal. We want to believe there is something more to this life than the miseries we see every day. How can I explain how it’s lasted this long? Again, that’s easy. You obviously don’t know anything about church history and how much control they had to ask such a question. Can I explain why supposedly over 5,000 documents agree? Sure. It’s called scotoma: the eyes see what they want to see. If you are determined not to see errors in the scriptures, you won’t. You are wearing rose coloured glasses. I’m not saying the Bible doesn’t have a place in the world, but I do have problems with everything in it being taken as literal fact, when I’m convinced that not everything is. There was no divine author. The stories were written down by men – sometimes many hundreds of years afterwards. And these men had agendas. If and when you realize that some of it is metaphor, you will find yourself in a much happier place spiritually with new eyes to see. You will see so much more than what is in front of you and see the bible as a richer document and you will wonder why you didn’t see it before. As I said in my last post, I am not going to be the one that stands up says which part is which (even though some things are more obvious than others).

You just haven’t seen it yet. You may never. Until you do, we cannot communicate. Please do not speak of this again; I do not wish to communicate with you ever again. There is no point, as we will probably never agree and it’s just not worth the time effort, stress and heartache on my part. Until your eyes are opened, this whole exercise is pointless. It’s not because if you don’t agree with me, you aren’t welcome to talk to me. It’s just I don’t think there is enough common ground to have a rational discussion. I have made a conscious point of weeding out people like you from my life: legalistic christians that really don’t understand grace. What gives you the right to say to me "Turn to Him"? What gives you the right to ask me when last I asked the Lord for guidance? How dare you presume I don't. Who made me answerable to you? Arrogant, ignorant, condescending, paternalistic, chauvinistic, holier-than-thou attitudes and beliefs wrapped in the hypocrisy of “caring” like what you have displayed are what drove me and millions like me from the church. The Inquisitors said the same thing when they were torturing their victims: they were doing it for the good of the person’s soul. Based on your comments, I think in another day and age you would have been one of them – persecuting anyone who disagreed with you. Perhaps no one (especially a woman) has ever dared say these things to you, but since I will not be communicating with you ever again, I have no problem of telling you exactly what I think of you. Your brand of "christianity" needs to die. The sooner the better.

You may never have the eyes to see, but I pray your children do one day.