It's Time to Come out of the Closet

Ha! Bet that title got your attention. I guess it's time I do something I normally don't do: talk about something personal on the Internet. This is going to be a very long post. Okay, let's start:

I was raised a (Protestant) Christian, went to Catholic elementary school, a horrible Pentecostal high school, and Baptist Bible College. I always got "A's" in anything to do with religion or the Bible. I sailed through my One Year Bible Certificate at Bible College. I was heavily involved in church and church-related activities. I sang in the choir, led music teams, taught Sunday School, was on the Missions Committee, etc. etc. I believed the Bible was the literal, inerrant word of God, that Jesus was the Son of God who came to earth to die for our sins and that all who believed in his message of salvation would go to Heaven.

Yet, deep down, I always had issues. I struggled with a lot of things. How could a loving God demand that the Israelites wipe out whole communities of people, including innocent children? These were people that didn't have the chance to hear about the Israelite god or given a chance to convert, and God demands they are wiped out and sent to Hell? I had problems with that big time. I saw one or two other things in the Bible that bothered me, too: why are there two stories of Judas' death in the New Testament? One is in Matthew 27, the other in the first Chapter of Acts. One says he hangs himself, and the other says he trips in a field and his intestines spilled out. There was no way I could reconcile the two stories. Then there were the crucifixion stories where one gospel says that the thieves that were crucified with Jesus both reviled him and another says that one begged Jesus to remember him when Jesus came into his kingdom. Okay, I could gloss over that one a bit. Two different people at the crucifixion were there at slightly different times. One missed the thief begging for forgiveness. Yet, still it bothered me.

It also bothered me that no matter how hard I struggled with my weaknesses, they never improved. No matter how much I really tried - and I did - I just kept failing. It was discouraging. I would continually fall into despair and dejection and a vicious cycle of legalism. I looked around at the people I was in church with and found myself incredibly lonely; I must be a very bad person if I was wrestling with this stuff - it seemed they had it easy. No one else seemed to be wrestling with the issues and questions I was. I just kept getting told to "have faith." I found those platitudes really unhelpful and insulting. I learned to keep my mouth shut.

Then, one day, I met DH. It was refreshing to talk to him, as he had wrestled with the same isues and questions. He suggested that there were others that had, too. In fact, a of of very intelligent people wrestled with those same issues. When I read Freud's "The Future of An Illusion", I was blown away by his statement that we try to gain god's approval as the same way we tried to gain our father's. It was true. I knew it. That's exactly what we do. DH also talked a lot about "radical" grace. It helped me see things in a new light. For several years I was still a mainstream christian and still believed, but then something else happened: I had an epiphany; a crisis. My world was ripped apart, and I would never see things in the same way. It was Easter 2001 and I read a book called, "The Hiram Key". It was a history of freemasonry; I wasn't expecting anything too radical, and I was interested in the masons and the Templars. But there was something in the early chapters that changed my outlook on everything I'd ever been told. In that book, there was a list of demi-gods that were born to human mothers and divine fathers around Christmas and sacrificed/crucified around Easter. Here are some of them: Mithras, Adonis, Attis, Dionysis. I was stunned - and these all predated Christ by hundreds of years. In all my readings, I'd never heard of any of this. I'd never even heard of Mithras. That was it. In that moment, it was like "scales fell from my eyes" and I never saw things the same. There was no way that I could dismiss the rest of those demi-god stories as myth and say that the one that I was raised to believe was the only one that was historically true. There was too much that could just be dismissed lightly. That was the end for me. From that point on, I could no longer accept Christianity as literally true. I walked away never to return. I've since done more readings that include those names and more. If you read Fraser's "Golden Bough" you'll come across more myths that are very much the same as the Jesus story. In fact, the parallels between Jesus and Mithras are so close, it's scary. So much so that the early church fathers claimed that the devil went back in time and screwed with the space time continuum and planted the story. Yeah. Right. It's sad to think that a lot of people bought that nonsense.

Around the time I started reading "The Hiram Key," DH was reading a book called, "The Templar Revelation" and, at one point, he leaped out of his chair and said, "Have you seen the Last Supper?" I said, "Of course I've seen the Last Supper." He asked me to pull up a picture online, and I did. He pointed out the person sitting on Jesus' right (our left) and he said, "That's a woman." I had to agree; it looked like a woman to me. Little did we know that within two years, millions more people would see it too with the publication of "The DaVinci Code" but I'm getting ahead of myself. It was one of those moments you never forget. You look at the painting, and look at it and wonder why you hadn't seen it before. It could very well be scotoma: the eye seeing what it wants to see. Does that mean that I want to see a woman now? Perhaps. I'm not ruling that out. Art historians claim that John was often painted very effeminate looking (look at Leondardo's painting of John the Baptist to see what I'm talking about. You can see it here

The next year (2002) I read, "The Holy Blood, Holy Grail" "("HBHG"). DH had been trying to get me to read that for quite some time and I was now ready. I was captivated from the first chapter. It started with the atmosphere of a detective novel about a priest called Bérenger Saunière in southern France in a small place called Rennes Le Chateau. The priest found "something" under his church and suddenly he became VERY wealthy. He was visited by all sorts of important people and even went to Rome. He never spoke of where the money came from. There is some talk that he trafficked in masses, but that doesn't explain how filthy rich he was. When he died in 1916, he was refused the last rites by the attending bishop who walked out of the room ashen faced. The writers went on to hypothesize that what Saunière found was documentation that proved there was a bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene and that the royal houses of Europe traced their ancestry back to them ("the divine right of kings"). That line of kings were called the Merovingians. They were later betrayed by the Catholic Church who replaced them with the Carolingian line.

Now, I'm not saying everything the authors said was right - even they don't claim that. Yet somehow, it made a lot of sense to me. The Hebrew word "messiah" meant earthly king; it was not meant to be a heavenly king. The Jews were right in expecting that. It also made sense to me that the Jews would have kept track of David's royal bloodline and heirs. No, I'm not talking about the census in the Gospel of Luke; historically, that never happened. Augustus NEVER ordered such a census. We have excellent records of that period of Roman history and there was no such census ordered. It would have been logistically impossible. Also, Herod was dead by the time Jesus was born (approximately 4 B.C.) and he (Herod) was not contemporary with Quirinus who Luke claims was governor of Syria at the time Jesus was born). While reading HBHG and it's sequel, "The Messianic Legacy" I could literally feel the physical healing of my soul.

Yet, I was confused. I was in a place Joseph Campbell would call "The Dark Night of the Soul" and I wasn't sure where I stood on a lot of things. I was convinced that a lot of the Bible was metaphorically true and not historically true. I was sure that Jesus giving a blind man sight could easily be giving him the gift of spiritual sight and curing spiritual blindness and not curing physical blindness. To me, they were both miracles. Was I going to stand up and say, "This one is history; this one is metaphor? No way.

The more I read about the early church and church history, the more repulsed and angry I became. Constantine was no christian; he was lifelong member of the Sol Invictus/Mithras cult and converted to Christianity on his deathbed. (I've wanted to trademark that phrase for a long time now: "Constantine: The Original Deathbed Catholic"). I found it very easy to believe that there was an agenda to cover up the fact that Jesus was married and possibly fathered children. On one side, there was the matter of secrecy, in order to ensure the survival of the family and, two, there was the agenda of disparaging Magdalene (and thereby denegrating all women) as the church fathers were misogynists. It's estimated that millions of European women were denounced as witches and tortured to death by the church. And guess who benefited? The Church. For the lands and properties of those victims of witch killings were seized by the Church. One tends to think there had to be more motivation than just the elimination of heresy: it was greed. Today, when I see photos of St. Peter's and the Sistine Chapel, I no longer see the beauty, I see blood money and I am repulsed. I think to myself, "How many innocent women paid the ultimate price for this?" Monty Python got it right in their scene involving a witch trial in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." You can see the scene here. You may laugh, (and it is funny) but if you know church history, sadly, the logic they follow is fairly accurate. In an episode of the Simpsons where they recount the Pilgrims coming to America, Bart denounces Lisa as a witch. Her response is, "Bart, the ability to do double-digit addition does not make one a witch." (or words to that effect, I'm can't find the exact wording). And I'm only talking about women; the church's treatment of Jews is another matter. It's shocking to think that the attitude that "the Jews killed Jesus" still persists. The facts are they didn't. Jesus was crucified, which was a Roman form of execution - not Jewish. The Jews used stoning as a form of execution. Since Jesus was not stoned to death, but crucified, the Jews were NOT responsible for his death. Sadly, it's led to a lot of horrors perpetrated against them: pogroms, expulsions, and, of course, the holocaust.

Keep in mind, this was all before The DaVinci Code was published. As DH said, "I'm so glad you read all that stuff before it became cool to believe it." When The DaVinci Code was published in 2003, I knew I would have to read it, and I did. My only problem with reading the book was that I knew where he was going with the story; we'd read the same books. DH never read it (he very rarely reads fiction), but we saw the movie opening weekend and he was impressed and said, "He [Dan Brown] did his homework." When DH had read "HBHG" way back in the 80's he said he felt the premise would make for a good thriller and said Dan Brown did a far better job than he ever could have with it.

I am constantly amused and frustrated at the vitriol that is thrown at the book. Come on, people. It's fiction. To me the arguments they throw at it are "straw man" arguments; they weren't attacking the real issue. If you want to address the real issues Dan Brown raises, then attack "HBHG" and the other books like "The Templar Revelation" that Dan Brown used as the basis for his research - the books that are non-fiction. The one argument that amuses me that people raise is, "If Jesus was married, it would be in the Bible." Well, I'm not sure about you, but I see a lot of information missing about Jesus in the Bible: What were his first words? How old was he when he began to walk? What subjects did he like in school? Who were his playmates? What were his favourite foods? etc. etc. The Bible is not some reality t.v. or "The Truman Show" where the cameras were on him 24 hours a day capturing his every moment for posterity. The Bible never said Jesus (to quote the Steven Curtis Chapman song), "...cried when he was hungry; did all the things that babies do. He rocked and he napped in his mother's lap and wriggled and giggled and cooed." The Bible never talks about those things, but one can assume that they happened since Jesus was fully human. I've heard arguments from an evangelical perspective (can't remember where, but it might have been at bible college) where I was told that, based on Hebrew culture at the time, that it would have been unusual for Jesus not to have been married, as it was a Jewish young man's duty to marry and bear sons.

Okay, so if it would have been normal for Jesus to have been married, who would be the most likely candidate based on what we know? It seems (almost) obvious: Mary Magdalene. Legends persisted that she went to France after the crucifixion taking the grail with her and was accompanied by a "dark-skinned servant girl" named Sarah. Woah, nelly. San greal (Holy Grail) was probably a copyist's error; it should read sang real, which means royal blood, or blood royal. Think of the drink sangria: it's red. So, Mary Magdalene goes to France with the blood royal accompanied by a servant girl named Sarah? If you know the meaning of the name Sarah, you should be stunned: it means princess. Is it so far fetched to believe that someone who was fleeing for their life and wanted to conceal her child's royal connections would refer to her as a "servant" (think of both Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament - they both did the same thing when it came to their wives; they referred to them as "sisters"). Is it so hard to believe that people would have had to cloak this in metaphor and symbols for the protection of the family?

In order to tarnish Magdalene's reputation, the Church called her a prostitute. She was no such thing - yet the stigma remains. There was a Jewish tradition that God had a wife, but the Catholic Church did all they could to wipe out the sacred feminine. However, belief in the "goddess" survived. She was transplanted in the belief that Mary, the mother of god (not Mary Magdalene) is the Queen of Heaven and the intermediary between man and God. (Hey, that's what I was taught at Catholic School). The final scene of the mini-series "The Mists of Avalon" depicts it beautifully. You can see it: here. That's Julianna Margulies as Morgaine (Morgana Lefay) who is also narrating the scene.

I know that C.S. Lewis said that Jesus was either a lunatic, liar or Lord. But, as I read in Bart Ehrman's "Jesus Interrupted", Lewis was missing another category: legend. I am fairly convinced that there was a Jesus (though Jesus is a title, and not a name). I've read convincing arguments that Jesus was a pharisee. If that was true, that would be an even stronger argument that Jesus was married, as you had to be married in order to be a pharisee.

This brings us to the other night when we watched a documentary called "Bloodline". We were unsure if it was going to shed any new information on the subject, and we were both stunned. For guess what? It would appear that they have found Mary Magdalene's tomb in France - just as the stories claimed she was. In the words of the first Lord of the Rings movie: History became legend. Legend became myth - and for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge. Yes, Tolkien was in on it, too. He knew. Aragorn was definitely a Merovingian. Aragorn's father, just like St. Dagobert (a Merovingian king who was betrayed and murdered) was killed with a spear through his eye, and Aragorn had the ability to heal, which was characteristic of the Merovingian kings.

Don't shoot the messenger. In the words of the X Files: "The truth is out there" for those that wish to see. History proves that Christianity is built on nothing but a pack of cards, violence, and lies. It's high time that Christianity as we know it is destroyed. Go read for yourself. Here are a list of books I've read that have highly influenced me:

Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh;
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar by Margaret Starbird;
Mary Magdalene - Christianity's Hidden Goddess by Lynn Picknett;
Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contraditions in the Bible (and why we don't know about them) by Bart D. Ehrman;
Jesus for the Non-Religious by John Shelby Spong;
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity by Hyam Maccoby;
Jesus the Pharisee by Hyam Maccoby;

If you read the same books and come to a different conclusion, I don't mind. I was shocked to discover so many contradictions in the Bible. There's a lot more than I believed possible. I have no issues with people that challenge their spiritual beliefs and may come to a different place. As the pastor that married DH and I once said, "There is truth in all places." For me, this was where my journey took me. In no way am I saying that I have all the answers. In fact, the more I read, the more I realize I don't know and am always open to re-evaluating my beliefs. New archealogical discoveries are always being made; new books are always being written. Do I still consider myself a christian? Yes and No. Yes, because it's the mythology that's influenced me the most. No because I don't believe the doctrinal statements. I consider myself somewhat of an "emergent christian". I refuse to ever again attend a regular church, but enjoy discussing religious issues and subjects with DH and a few other friends who no longer attend church. I do miss the sense of community, but I just don't fit in anymore - and there's no going back. What has been seen, cannot be unseen. Do I believe in God? Perhaps - but certainly not the vengeful, bloodthirsty god that's depicted in the Old Testament. Yet, I've seen too much of some divine guidance (for lack of another word) to completely dismiss a spiritual realm.

In the words of Bill Maher, in his documentary "Religulous", (which I highly recommend) "If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler - a mafia wife."

But one thing I am sure of, I WILL NOT be a mafia wife any longer. I wasted over 30 years of my life believing something that was nothing more than mythology and a fairy tale. I plan to spend the rest of my life working to bring it down. If you've made it this far doing this extremely long post, thank you.