Questions About my Religious Development

An old friend from high school and college just asked me some rather deep question about my religious experience and beliefs. I thought that they were interesting enough to share, both the questions and my answers. For reference, I was raised in an Evangelical Church (Presbyterian); became an atheist when I went to college; began practicing Buddhism later in college and developing it significantly in the Marine Corps, where I was stationed in Japan for three years; turned to Gnosticism later as a more symbolically-familiar system of mystagogy; and eventually returned to Christianity through the Episcopal Church, although with a strongly mystical/Gnostic outlook.
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I have a question, in your switch to Christianity. I was wondering did you just one day say I believe. Where before it was the absence of belief.

When I was a child, of course, I never thought to questions the teachings of the Presbyterian Church. They were presented to me as fact by people who seemed very certain in their knowledge. But even then, it seemed as if something were missing. I remember once asking my baby-sitter (this was before I was in kindergarten) what it was like when she prayed. I tried to pray when the grown-ups did, but I never felt anything from it. They always looked so sincere, and I was sure that I was missing out on some special connection that everyone else had. But I wasn’t.

Later, in Junior high school, I started reading about Christian history. I found found all sorts of references to ritual practices (such as the celebration of the Eucharist), holy meditation, vigils, constant formulaic prayers, etc. But my religious “mentors” assured me that this was all evil stuff that true Christians did not participate in; true salvation lay in sitting in a pew once a week to listen to a preacher tell me how grocery shopping on Wednesday reminded him of John 3:16. Once a month, we had saltines and grape juice for no apparent reason (the passage about the Last Supper was read, but no one there was having saltines and grape juice, nor was any special significance placed on the congregation partaking or not). “Spiritual Development” seemed mostly to consist of feeling superior to others, who would go to Hell after death for participating in a long list of no-no’s which had no basis in the Bible… Even though the Bible was supposed to be inerrant history and the sole foundation of the faith.

It was my inability to reconcile the idea of a a God who was supposed to be all-good and all-loving, with a God who would condemn people to eternal Hellfire for betting on the outcome of a card game, which eventually led me to break entirely with the Church and declare myself an atheist.

One of the great problems that the modern Church faces, is that it has almost entirely replaced mystagogy (the actual spiritual development of the individual) with evangelism (trying to get more people through the door). Mystagogy is what develops the Gnosis Kardia, the wordless understanding of the heart. “Belief” is the vehicle of evangelism; it has nothing to do with mystagogy. My return to the Church, therefore was not a matter of “belief”; it was a process of development, as I discovered the (for me) rather neutral mystagogy of Buddhism, then eventually translated it into the far richer symbology of the Gnostic tradition, and from there to Liturgical Christianity via the Episcopal Church.

Did you feel an emptiness, or a search for something. I am searching.

Yes. There was always an emptiness, from that first question about prayer. Becoming an atheist didn’t resolve the issue at all; it just gave me an excuse to ignore it, or pretend it was something else. Something easy. I like to say, “Atheism is not the Truth; it is the abdication of the search”.

But I have a problem with organized religion, I believe there is a supreme being, but GOD as people interpret him and Jesus I don’t understand or believe.

One of the primary reasons I eventually joined the Episcopal Church is that they don’t have a theology. The Church exists as a vehicle for the Sacraments and the spiritual development of its members; reading and understanding the Bible is up to the individual. For example, the focus of every service is the Holy Eucharist, the physical expression of the Grace of God. Episcopalians do believe in trans-substantiation, with the simple explanation that “the Christ said, ‘this is My body’, therefore it is.” It is not a hollow eating of saltines and grape juice as I grew up with, nor is there a complex catechism of specific belief I am required to accept as with the Roman Catholic Church. I participate in a powerful ritual, and it is up to me find the meaning of it.

This, to me, is absolutely the perfect function of a Church.

Do you take the Bible at its finite meaning, as there is no room for interpretation.

THAT is a very complex question. Here is my basic answer: it doesn’t matter if you want to believe in the Bible, or you’re trying to disprove it. If you are reading it as a monolithic history textbook, you are wrong.

“The Bible” is actually an anthology–or, if you are a Greek primacist (you believe that the New Testament was originally written in Greek), several DIFFERENT anthologies. Happily, a basic linguistic analysis (or just a bit of common sense) demonstrates that the New Testament was originally written in ARAMAIC, as a collection known as the Peshitta. The Old Testament, although commonly read from Hebrew, was probably also written in Aramaic originally–but since Hebrew and Aramaic are essentially dialects of the same language, this isn’t NEARLY as important as recognizing the Aramaic New Testament.

The fact that the Bible is an anthology important, because not every book in it was written for the same purpose. While there are some historical references, the modern idea of “history” was not practiced in ancient Aramaic culture. Some books of the Bible are prophecy, some are mythology, some are codes of conduct for Aramaic culture. So, while I do accept the books of the Bible as true, that truth has nothing to do with historical accuracy or scientific validity.

The fact that the Bible is Aramaic is even more important. Aramaic, like all Semitic languages, is deeply symbolic. The Bible is full of idiom and cultural references which are vital to actually understanding the meaning if the texts, yet are lost when one attempts to read an English translation as an historical account (not to mention the translation differences and errors of translation from Aramaic to Greek–which is why there are so many Greek Bibles which all disagree with each other). Can you imagine one of the Apostles reading about a lightsaber? He would have no basis to really understand the concept, unless he also studied the language and culture which produced it. That is what happens when someone picks up a King James Bible and tries to use it like a textbook of science and history.