Truth seeking

[possibility]

Hi everyone. 

To start at the beginning, I was born and raised in a practising catholic family in Australia, so I never really encountered the type of fundamental Christian attitudes I've read about in the U.S. Nevertheless, my upbringing was quite sheltered and myopic. I went to a catholic primary school and catholic all-girls secondary, I had participated in all the sacraments, and I always felt acutely aware of a 'spirituality' both within and around me. Then I finally discovered at university that there much more people out there than I originally thought who didn't believe in God. I found myself in a minority.

At about 16 I had already started to form opinions about life that didn't conform to catholic doctrine, most of which at the time had to do with sexuality, but that's another story. At 17 I was referring to myself as 'catholic by birth but Christian by choice'. At 18 I fell in love with an agnostic atheist, and on moving out of home (to 'live in sin') I stopped attending mass.

I'll say at this point that my mother was (and is) a staunch catholic by heritage. For her there is no other religion, and her responsibility as a mother is to pass her faith onto her children. So when I told her (over the phone, coward that I was) that I would no longer be going to mass, she hung up on me. It didn't help that she had no logical argument to offer - only the assertion that she had raised me to be catholic. After that we never discussed religion, and it's only recently that I have had the courage to discuss my perspective with her. To her credit, at seventy eight, she is at least listening.

My father was a truth seeker. He was initiated into Catholicism as an adult, but I think his attachment was to the whole package my mother offered that was missing from his life: strong family ties, high moral standards, tradition, ritual, heritage and absolute faith. He never discussed his faith, but I know that he continued to research Judaism, philosophy and the history of Christianity for most of his life. I like to think I inherited his curiosity.

 

So throughout my twenties I still considered myself Christian, but I didn't practise and I pretty much didn't think about it anymore. Then my husband (the same agnostic atheist) started working in the catholic education system, our two kids started going to a catholic school, and at 35 I also started work in the system. It sounds like a strange turn out, but we both saw that the benefits outweighed the risks for each of these decisions, and we both agreed to encourage open minded enquiry in our children (and by extension in ourselves), to counteract any indoctrination efforts. I soon discovered that the catholic education system (at least in Australia) is really only effective in indoctrinating if the parents are practising, so we were fairly safe in that respect.

Around that time my father had died, and about a year later I had one of those near death experiences that leave you pondering your life's purpose. I still drive past the same spot at least once a week where I fell asleep at the wheel at 110km/hr and missed a ravine by a few feet (it would certainly have killed me), instead side-swiping the fencing on a small bridge. I came out of that without a scratch (the car was another story), but the reality of how close I came to the end of my life was not lost on me. Why am I still alive? If I had died at that point, what would I have left unfinished? My cultural framework told me this was God or perhaps even my dad watching over me from 'heaven', and that there was something more I should be doing with my life. Being a little wiser and more educated by now, I figured I had to explore this idea of spirituality further.

So I became a truth seeker. I didn't want to be known as a cherry-picking Christian, but I couldn't find any one denomination that made sense to me. And I also saw plenty of merit in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Wicca. I was starting to sense the argument that "only one of us is right" was not the case. What if we're all correct in some way? Is that even possible?

Whenever I explored atheist discussions in open forums it seemed as if I was coming at it almost from the opposite end to everyone else. I couldn't shake my awareness of a 'spirituality' to life. At that time I still essentially believed in God as a spiritual being that I could 'communicate' with in my mind, and my spiritual experiences made perfect sense to me. But I felt that most arguments against spirituality descended into intellectual bullying. I read and followed discussions, but I was frequently disappointed by the attitude of atheists, who seemed to hide behind the format of intellectual debate to belittle and humiliate those who came forward with the courage to plunder the depths of their faith. Atheists seemed to see the debate as a battle to be won, whereas most of these 'opponents' they intended to 'destroy' saw it merely as a testing ground for their faith, and the atheist as a fellow human being. I doubt they were aware of the distinction. I read so much anger and pain in the words of intellectual atheists, disguised as a sense of superiority and emotional distance. You can almost read the satisfied grin on their face as they reduce yet another discussion to 'come back when you're better prepared'. Then a series of comments akin to 'high fives all round' follows the retreating believer. If I was approaching a rejection of theism, then I wasn't going to be one of these people.

In what may seem like a detour off-topic, in the midst of this searching I found myself captivated by the Fifty Shades trilogy, and fascinated by the heated debates that surrounded it - particularly in Christian discussion forums. I noticed a similar trend to these arguments as those about the bible. The book was vilified by many who had a) never read more than a few pages, read only handpicked quotes, c) read it with a specific agenda in mind or d) read it filtered through a host of emotional baggage in relation to the content. And it was staunchly defended by readers who were either a) captivated by a deep emotional attachment to or identification with a particular character or only interested in what the book provided for them on the surface. For what it's worth, as a Christian female I was surprised to identify with Christian Grey, who saw himself as irredeemable, and felt a great respect for the female character who saw past that, but refused to be indoctrinated into a relationship built around a power imbalance. But that's another discussion.

Anyway, this realisation led me to admit that I myself had never read the bible from cover to cover with an open mind. So I did. At forty years of age this blew my mind wide open, and since then I read and researched widely, and progressed gradually from a theist to... something else.

 

As far as I can see, the God of the bible is a human construct. I don't believe there is a man in the sky, or even a being that lends itself to any concrete description or definition. But I do believe that there exists what I currently refer to as an eternal and limitless source of life, wisdom, power and possibility, for want of a better description. Suffice to say it has no name, form, voice or personality. It isn't watching me, protecting or judging me, and it isn't making a list of favourites. 

But I think the bible, as an articulation of spirituality and how it has changed and progressed across many generations within a single cultural group, shouldn't be rejected in its entirety. It's literature, some of it based on sketchy facts, but myth and legend all the same. The cultural and political motivations that have distorted it, the historical lack of knowledge and understanding that have limited it, and the naive judgements that have twisted it don't change my opinion that, hidden beneath it all, it still points decidedly towards a collective awareness of some eternal and limitless source of life, wisdom, power and possibility, and that it attempts to help humanity advance towards a greater sense of purpose. But then, I would argue, so does lots of other literature and cultural offerings.

But I think the moment the church collated these spiritual writings (discarding many others in the process) and bound them as an ultimate reference, it put the brakes on our ability to continue this growth process. I believe the literature of the bible is only the start of a journey alluded to in Genesis' Tower of Babel - one of accumulating all knowledge and understanding. The scientific knowledge and life experiences of the last two thousands years give us a very different view of spirituality than what we see in the bible. But I think we may find that what we come up with in the end will still be found hidden in both the New Testament and the Old. And in the Quran. And in the life examples (real or otherwise) of Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Probably also in the life works of Confucius, Plato, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Einstein and John Lennon, the experiences of the Holocaust and the Hiroshima bombing, and even in the Hollywood film industry as a complete body of work. And in the Internet. I have only limited observations and theory to back this up, but I'm working on it.

What I believe is that we communicate with and find access to this source through our connections with the life around us, and in doing so we also contribute to it with our life experiences, our words, actions and our cultural offerings. That might sound airy-fairy to many of you, but I find it makes sense to me at this point.

The reason I'm here is because I believe that religion by its nature confines, alienates and judges, and the more people that realise this, the better off we'll all be. But I am also here because I relate to the continued search for something of perhaps a spiritual nature, that for some of us feels like it was left behind with our religion. I want to be part of that search, and to find a way to articulate it for the benefit of anyone who seeks the truth.

[Loopylou]

2 hours ago, possibility said:

Anyway, this realisation led me to admit that I myself had never read the bible from cover to cover with an open mind. So I did. At forty years of age this blew my mind wide open, and since then I read and researched widely, and progressed gradually from a theist to... something else.

 

It is rather a mind-blowing experience to read the whole thing isn't it? When I became a Christian the minister was horrified that I'd started to read the bible at page 1 and he tried to convince me to stop. I soon understood why he was so horrified. I think you're right that when all these oral stories, mythologies, parables and other sorts of literature were written down, they were fixed in history. Had the bible stories continued to be passed down orally they would have evolved over time. Have you read 'The Evolution of God' by Robert Wright? I recommend it.

 

Anyway, welcome to the forum. I'm new myself, but I'm enjoying snooping around here.

[Geezer]

Welcome Possibility. Glad you found this site. I am a truth seeker too. I eventually determined my best chance of finding the truth about Christianity & the Bible would be found by reading religious historians, not apologist, historians. That has proven to be true. I've been studing & researching the origins & evolution of both the Bible & the Christian Faith for more than a decade now & I'm satisfied it is all manmade nonsense.

 

Robert M Price & Bart Ehrman are but 2 of a number of scholars I enjoy reading & highly recommend. My research has convinced me that both Jesus & Paul were literary figures & that the Gospels & Epistles are fictional stories. 

 

 

[Guest]

Possibility, welcome. I relate completely with how you've identified the search for truth. It seems clear to me that humans have evolved into beings continually in search of something 'spiritual' (however one wants to define that).  For some, a spiritual experience may be as simple as experiencing the love of others. (Love, afterall, cannot be proven to exist. It exists only as a subjective perception). But others hypothesize that there are truths yet to be discovered. One has to be open to the possibility that such truths may exist and - as with so many previous discoveries in history - the means for discovery may start with an unconventional way of thinking. Thank you for this post!

[possibility]

Thanks LoopyLou

I also experienced religious leaders and teachers trying to discourage me from reading it cover to cover - as if something terrible was going to happen to me, or perhaps I was going to discover something that they haven't yet...hmmm...

I have to clarify, I think the problem with these stories being collated is not so much that they stopped evolving. I personally would like to have seen the original oral versions written down and dated, too, so that we can see the progression of human spirituality from further back. But we can't blame anyone for that loss. I think the biggest problem is that this collection was sold to us as some kind of timeless and universal truth. We stopped collecting the stories. There is so much more documented evidence of the evolution of human spirituality from other writers at the time, from other cultural points of view and from the last two thousand years, that the status of the bible's collection seems a tad overdone.

In truth, it's not productive to assign blame to a belief system for the many small decisions and judgements made by individuals with what they thought were the best intentions at the time. All we can really do is make our own choices now with as much knowledge, understanding and courage as we can muster.

 

Hi Geezer

I understand where you're coming from with the 'man made nonsense' comment - it's tempting to throw the whole lot out the window when you realise that what you were told was truth or fact wasn't even close to it. But I'm not going to do that.

I was a Bachelor of Arts major at university, with a degree in Media Studies (which meant that I spent many hours watching movies and TV!). But where a science major would be taught to view subjective writing with skepticism and seek truth in objectivity, I was taught instead to view supposedly 'objective' texts (such as news and scientific articles) with skepticism and to search all texts, particularly purely fictional ones, for culturally, politically and historically positioned 'truths'.

So I actually find the bible easier to read now that I accept it as a wholly subjective text.

 

Thanks Faithfullness

I agree. You'll probably find me approaching a lot of topics and established ideas from an unconventional angle. I try not to let my knowledge and experience or lack of them limit my theories, and I'm happy to draw liberally from others' wealth of both in reconstructing them as I go!

I see spiritual experience as an awareness of the interconnectedness of all life - including past, present and future life. I think that makes love a manifestation of, or maybe just one way of describing, this awareness.

 

cheers to you all!

[ag_NO_stic]

I know this is an older post, but I couldn't help really resonating with what you said anyway. I'm not sure if I've confused "leftover Christian teachings" with an actual tendency for spirituality or not, it's something to reflect on. I studied psychology in school, which really screwed up my "gut feelings" with regard to emotion and cognition and how they interplay. To me, when I feel the sand between my toes at the beach, inhale the salty air, and take in the wonder of nature around me....or have coffee with a friend and make a serious emotional connection with them....or [insert emotional experience here] it's impossible to feel like there isn't something more sometimes. And I think the fact that people from so many backgrounds and faiths feel that "something more" feeling indicates that we have the propensity for something spiritual that's not necessarily straight up "tangible evidence." I think my studies in psychology can "interfere" with that feeling, because I do need to remember how much of my experiences are influenced by science. It's like a tug of war.  I'd be interested to try reading the Bible with the techniques you mentioned. Thanks for this post, it was refreshing.

[Ablemate]

I am staggered by the amount of self declared Xians who haven't read the bible.

whenever I engage in Xian discussions my wife, if present, will nearly always say that I have read the bible.

I don't mind her doing so but I never say so myself to justify my knowledge of the subject.

I just found that if I hoped to understand I needed to know what was in the bible. I have an avid interest in biblical archaeology and history. I was a Xian by birth thanks to my mother and was confirmed. I became critical when my dad died and my mum welcomed the local vicar who led us in prayer and mouthed the usual platitudes. I just couldn't reconcile gods will being my dad dying at 40 years old and leaving my mum to raise 4 kids under 16.

I 

[AlienGoddess]

 

I am staggered by the amount of self declared Xians who haven't read the bible.

whenever I engage in Xian discussions my wife, if present, will nearly always say that I have read the bible.

I don't mind her doing so but I never say so myself to justify my knowledge of the subject.

I just found that if I hoped to understand I needed to know what was in the bible. I have an avid interest in biblical archaeology and history. I was a Xian by birth thanks to my mother and was confirmed. I became critical when my dad died and my mum welcomed the local vicar who led us in prayer and mouthed the usual platitudes. I just couldn't reconcile gods will being my dad dying at 40 years old and leaving my mum to raise 4 kids under 16.

I 

I loved the history of the Bible too. You just escaped religious delusion and 2000 years of lie to humanity.