Misunderstanding

I perceive that you misunderstand me, my position and what I say, Louis.

On the other hand, I DO understand YOUR position ............ because I was in that position myself ......... many years ago.

I was with a "church" at that time. It was sort of a street level, informal type of gathering of Christians, headed up by a radical dynamic pastor. Nevertheless, it was a church by every definition of a New Testament church.

We met in the basement of an old Anglican church building on Sunday nights. The Anglican assembly -in the interest of ecumenicalism and making some money as well- rented the space to us .......... AND to another "weird" group as well. The other group had some strange name which I can't remember at the moment but .... I remember the slogan they had pasted on the notice board: "The Awareness of Oneness". We shared the same space with them but met at different times so that there was no overlap in our meetings.

Well, I remember looking at that slogan and feeling a little nauseous as I thought to myself, 'that's what happens when people give up their belief in God and then try to find something else to replace it ....trying to retain SOME kind of justifiable belief. They have to invent themselves weird slogans and ideas and concepts ..... just to keep up a semblance of a faith in something.' "Having a form of Godliness but denying the power thereof .... Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened." ....... and so on, as other Bible verses flowed through my head ....

I expect that you have the SAME thoughts about me right now .... as well.

Today, I understand what the group was REALLY about. Whatcha gonna do when you find out that you've been believing a lie for most of your life? Now I KNOW that you think I'm wrong or mistaken today. Fine. But what about if I had been believing in something else -like say, Santa Claus- and had fervently believed in him all my life .... and then bit by bit, I began to see beyond any doubt, that Santa Claus was purely the product of imagination. What would I do then? What could I do with my investment in living the kind of life that Santa Claus expects of us ....... had made sacrifices to live that life properly and to it's fullest potential? What about the epiphanies and miracles I experienced from my belief in Santa Claus ...PROVING .... that he was true? Should I throw it all out of the window and devote the rest of my life to living in self-indulgence now?

I think that's the part YOU don't comprehend about me. You think something went wrong in my life ...... I soured on Christianity and then turned away from it. Not so. I was a firm Christian believer in Jesus Christ. Yes, I COULD see problems with the Bible all right but I was a bit more progressed than the fanatical fundamentalist who believes every word of it virtually rolled off the tongue of God. I knew there were human elements in there that contradicted each other. Yet, that didn't matter to me. Eat the flesh and spit out the bones, I figured. The one CENTRAL figure -Jesus Christ- was for real, I figured ........ since he's the central core of Christian belief. It was unthinkable to consider that he might NOT even have been a real historical person!

But ....... as I delved deeper into studies, it became extremely obvious that he WASN'T. The Gospel Jesus Christ never existed. There is absolutely no historical corroboration for his existence. If he was supposed to have done all the things he did, there's no way that historians would have missed the stories. Even more proving though, is the way the earliest church father spoke of Jesus Christ. He was a product of prophetic fulfillment and none of them had ever met him. He was mostly speculated into existence. A very good example from the NTestament itself is the story of Stephen. Here was a guy who was about to be stoned to death for his faith and he never ONCE mentioned the person for whom he was supposedly dying. All he spoke about was the old testament events and the prophets. Only in his last breath did he mention the Lord Jesus. This is extremely strange behavior if a real person by the name of Jesus Christ had lived just a short time before Stephen's ministry. That same lack or human recognition exists in all the epistles of the Bible. Add up the preponderance of evidence from the NTestament (excluding the Gospels and the first part of Acts) and it becomes painfully clear that the earliest Christians had a faith in an IMAGINED Jesus Christ and knew nothing of any real person by that name.

So then -having come to this painful conclusion- what do I do with my life-long faith? Try to explain it .......... that's what!

If those early Christians could be "turned on" by an imagined Jesus Christ ..... why shouldn't the same thing be viable today?

Yes, I AM AGAINST the effects of modern-day Christian belief ...... and I speak of that often. I find fault with that smug attitude of "WE ARE the ONLY CORRECT belief." It simply isn't true. Christian belief is no more valid than Islamic belief about God.

The EXPERIENCES of belief may seem to validate the otherwise dubious and shaky proof for the Bible's accuracy ........... but .......... other religions have exactly the SAME kinds of experiences (which proves THEIR belief to be true to them). Thus, experience and truthfulness of belief are totally disconnected from each other.

That leaves me with trying to explain how it's POSSIBLE that people can believe something that's not true or factual and YET get epiphanal experiences from that.

It's a fact. People of other religions get the same kinds of experience. Therefore, there's a commonality in ALL DIFFERENT religious belief. There's a connection.

Those Universal Truth folks then .... who shared our church space so long ago had it right then! The "awareness of oneness" ........ is REALLY where it's at!

((I)) was the one who was wrong.

-Vince