Conversions and De-Conversions - The final straw

When I review the nearly thirty chapters that I have written in this Conversions and De-Conversions series, I discover that my real de-conversion from Christianity began in 1993 when I left Calvary Chapel.  I remained a Christian for about 13 years after I made the decision to leave that church, but the single event of leaving Calvary Chapel was the first trigger that led to my eventual exit from Christianity.  It had been a slow accretion of assimilation into the worldly environment, a progressive education in the scientific method and critical analysis, and acquaintance and accommodation of people and cultures that were vastly different from my own.  It was a slow progression away from Christianity.  My ‘spiritual journey’, if I may call if that, may have stopped at any point since that time.  I might have received my education in Physics, and from there lived a perfectly happy life, ambivalently believing in God.  I might have gotten a career in private industry, with a vague belief in some kind of Heavenly reward for a life well lived, while privately chuckling at my naive days as a Fundamentalist.  I might have been content marrying a Catholic girl from the Philippines, nominally converting to her religion, and lived as a Sunday Morning Catholic.  I could have remained, as so many do, believing that God does not care what religion I follow, as long as I have Faith in something, and that is ultimately all that really matters.  This story could have ended at any one of those points.  In fact, I do believe that many, if not most, of the people who leave a Fundamentalist brand of Christianity usually do end at one of those points.  I do think that there are many refugees of Fundamentalist Christianity, who are now content as nominally Christian believers.  They managed to escape from their cultish environment of religious fanaticism, only to live with the vaguest idea that God does not care what they believe, as long as they gain their moral behavior from a belief in some nebulous something.

What turned it around for me?  Why did I not rest content with vague spiritual beliefs?  I can think of two primary reasons:

I have always taken my reliance on faith and belief very seriously.  If I am to believe in something, I want to know what it is.  I at least want to have a pretense of thinking I know what it is.  I could never understand how people could simply change their core religious beliefs and convictions, simply as a matter of personal taste or convention.  I did not understand that as a Fundamentalist Christian, and I do not understand it now as a de-converted Christian apostate.

I loved my wife, and I desperately wanted to be a good husband.  I had been led to believe by my religious indoctrination that religious beliefs were the only acceptable standard of morality.  The only way to be good was through belief in God.  Jesus set the standard in His many discourses, notably the Sermon on the Mount.  If I wanted the strength of the Holy Spirit, which was necessary to achieve a more Christ-like life, I had to return to my Christian roots.  I had no desire to ever become an ignorant Fundamentalist as I was in Calvary Chapel, but by starting a home Bible Study group and devoting more of my time to prayer, I was inevitably being drawn back into that brittle Fundamentalist mindset.  At the same time, I was being influenced by my wife’s Catholic beliefs.  I was being pulled in three separate directions, the Scientific method and secularism, Fundamentalism and Catholicism.  Nominal believers may be able to rest content in vague religious beliefs.  I could not rest content.  Something had to give.

I mentioned the initial trigger that occurred in 1993.  There was another trigger.  There was a single incident that pushed me from my comfortable but tense ledge of ambivalent Christian belief, into full apostasy.  In fact, that single trigger, that single incident, was actually something that I said.  The trigger that led me out of Christianity was a single sentence that I barked at Rosemary in anger and confusion.  It began with a conversation with Rosemary, my wife of a single year.

We were lying in bed.  She could not sleep.  She was forced awake by the riveting suspense of a popular best-seller.  I have never been one to keep up on the latest pop culture phenomena, so while I had seen plenty of people reading the novel The Da Vinci Code, I had no idea what it was about.  Just a popular thriller, I had thought.  Rosemary was up in bed, unable to break her attention from the gripping story, and its mind-bending revelations.

She sat up, eager to talk with me.  “This book is so interesting!  It is a thriller about a professor who is investigating the Bible and the family of Jesus.”

“Jesus?”  She had my attention.  So this was what the popular best-seller was about.  "It is a story, but it is one of those stories that is based on real facts.  So this professor of symbology is talking with his older friend, another professor, about the Bible. “

“Symbology?  What is that?”

“I guess he studies symbols.  Anyway, listen to what this book says about the Bible.”  Rosemary picked up her novel and read a fictional conversation between two professors:

"…More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them." 

"Who chose which gospels to include?" 

"Aha! The fundamental irony of Christianity!  The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great." 

"I thought Constantine was a Christian…" 

"…Hardly.  He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest.  In Constantine's day, Rome's official religion was sun worship - the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun - and Constantine was its head priest.  Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome.  Three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ's followers had multiplied exponentially.  Christians and pagans began warring, and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to rend Rome in two.  Constantine decided something had to be done.  In 325 A.D., he decided to unify Rome under a single religion.  Christianity…" 

"…Constantine was a very good businessman.  He could see that Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse.  Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity.  By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties…" 

"…The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable.  Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints.  Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus.  And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual - the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of 'God-eating' - were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions." 

"…Don't get a symbologist started on Christian icons.  Nothing in Christianity is original.  The pre-Christian God Mithras - called the Son of God and the Light of the World - was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.  By the way, December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus.  The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Even Christianity's weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans…" 

"…During this fusion of religions, Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea … At this gathering, many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon - the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus." 

"Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet ... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.  A mortal" 

"…Jesus' establishment as 'the Son of God' was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea." 

"Hold on.  You're saying Jesus' divinity was the result of a vote?" 

"A relatively close vote at that … Nonetheless, establishing Christ's divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman Empire and to the new Vatican power base.  By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable…" 

"…Because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man.  To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke.  Form this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history.  Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned."

     -P231 – 234

“Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.  It is fiction isn’t it?  Just a story?”

“Yes this is a story, but it says at the beginning of the book that the facts about the Bible and history are all true.”

I did not know what to make of all this new information.  It was obviously blasphemous nonsense.  But if this blockbuster novel was based on real facts about the origins of the Bible, as if claimed, then I had no answer for it.  The trouble was, I was 41 years old.  I had been a Christian with greater or less intensity, for almost my entire life.  I was taught to revere to the Bible.  The word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.  It was the foundational cornerstone of my Faith, and the only sure means of God’s revelation and communication to me.  And despite my shock at the blasphemy of that silly novel, the truth was, I had no idea where the Bible came from.  Sure, the apostles wrote the Gospels.  Paul wrote his epistles.  A few other apostles and close associates of Jesus wrote some other epistles.  But I had never even entertained the idea of how the various writings were assembled and collated into a unified Canon.  As I mentioned in a previous chapter to this series, I had never heard a single sermon or lesson that described exactly how the Biblical Canon was decided on and assembled.  I have repeatedly emphasized how Calvary Chapel viewed ignorance as a virtue, and if Pastor Skip knew this information, he never shared it with his congregation.  The only information that I had on this shocking information was a few short bullet points in my Thomson Chain Reference Study Bible, about how certain apocryphal books were left out of the Canon.  But I had never in my life heard of such shocking things such as some eighty extra gospels that were intentionally suppressed by a Roman emperor.  I could not believe that the divinity of Jesus was voted on in a political maneuver to unify the Roman Empire.  Where did our Christian Canon come from?  Who wrote our Christian Creeds?  I had no idea.  But it sure did not happen the way Dan Brown’s novel was presenting it.  That was certainly a lie. 

I would have brushed this off as just another pop culture attack on my Christian Faith except for one thing.  Rosemary, along with the rest of the book reading public, was finding this book irresistible.  I was fearful that the ideas of who Jesus was in that book would deceive her into a heretical version of Christ’s Divinity.  I privately expressed my concern to some of my friends in our home Bible Study group.  “It would not be so bad if it was just silly fiction,” I said.  “But Dan Brown is presenting the background history as fact!”

“Yes, yes.  It is a tragedy.  A lie from the pit of Hell,” my friend agreed with me.  “The World hates the truth of God’s Word, and they will always attack Jesus.”

In all the years that I attended Calvary Chapel, they may have never given a single sermon about origins of Christianity, but in anticipation of the upcoming Da Vinci Code movie starring Tom Hanks, refutations of The Da Vinci Code along with mini-lessons in early Christian history were suddenly coming out of the woodwork.  If I was shocked by what Rosemary read in the book, I am certain that there were plenty of other Christians who were just as shocked as I was.  We were isolated from any investigation of Church history by a tradition of simply accepting unquestioned dogma.  For all our church pastors were concerned, I could have believed that the Bible simply and miraculously appeared out of thin air 2000 years ago.  The laity of the Evangelical Church was uncorrupted and innocent from the taint of knowledge.  But The Da Vinci Code tantalized Christians with knowledge of a hidden past, suppressed Gospels and secret councils.  Pastors suddenly had to act fast.  For a couple of months adjacent to the release of The Da Vinci Code movie in 2006, it seemed every church marquee in my neighborhood boasted an upcoming sermon that would debunk Dan Brown and reveal the real history of Biblical origins.

Rosemary has always loved a good thriller.  She loved reading The Da Vinci Code and could not wait to watch her favorite actor Tom Hanks play the lead in the upcoming movie.  I was seriously concerned.  I had to show her the error in her thinking.  I had to demonstrate that reading such blasphemous trash would lead to errors in her Christian beliefs.

There was a Baptist Church near our house that I passed every day, but we had never as yet attended.  During this crucial time, their marquee was one of the throng that promised to debunk The Da Vinci Code during their next Sunday morning service.  In one of the most despicable and conniving tricks I pulled on Rosemary during our marriage together, I decided to trick her into attending that Sunday morning service, in a tiny, unknown Baptist Church near our house, and get her educated. 

“Rosemary, there is another Baptist Church I have been wanting to attend.  It is very close to our house, and it is also very small.  Let’s go there next Sunday and see what it is like.”  I never mentioned that I knew very well what the sermon would be dedicated to.  Nope.  I just randomly happened to want to go there.

We sat in the pews amongst the tiny congregation.  The elderly pastor was overjoyed to see a younger married couple visiting his church, and he warmly welcomed us.  I actually enjoyed singing from old hymnals the likes of which I had not seen since I was young.  Then the sermon began.  It was a terrible sermon, but its intent was to be a lecture and as such it was actually quite well done.  It contained information about Christian origins that I had never heard before.  Rosemary was used to homilies during her morning Mass, not history lectures.  But the Evangelical Church suddenly found these lectures necessary to face the emergency crisis that The Da Vinci Code was challenging the Church with and deceiving believers.  The pastor had an overhead projector to place his transparent slides on, and Rosemary got pummeled with names, dates and other details about the origin of her Faith.  She did not know what hit her.  She was not used to listening to lectures on Sunday morning and vowed to attend Mass afterwards to make up for lost time.  The Pastor, to my satisfaction, completely destroyed the specific claims made by Dan Brown in his blasphemous novel.  Rosemary might have hated the Sunday morning lecture that debunked her stupid novel, but at least she now knew the truth.  It was tough medicine that she needed to swallow. 

We never again attended that tiny Baptist Church.  As far as I was concerned, it had done its job.  I was too cowardly to tell Rosemary the truth of why I wanted to go there.  But I thought that I lied to her for her own good.  Rosemary challenged my Christian Faith with The Da Vinci Code, and rather than investigate those claims and learn something from the experience, I let religious instinct drive my reactions.  My Faith was being attacked, so despite my growing liberality, despite my years of education and lessons in critical thought, I circled the wagons and retreated to the safety of my long lost Fundamentalism.  I had once hated the Fundamentalism that I escaped from, but it was something that I at least understood.  I had no idea how to evaluate the challenges posed by The Da Vinci Code, but I knew I always had a home in the familiar territory of Fundamentalism.  I was still too easily offended when my beliefs were scrutinized.

Finally, the moment came that I teased at the beginning of this chapter.  The trigger that finally led me out of Christianity was a single sentence that I barked at Rosemary in anger and confusion.  The movie premiered.  Rosemary was excited to see it.  Despite all my warnings to her, despite taking her to a Sunday morning lecture about the lies in that story, she still wanted to see the movie.  What was I doing wrong?  Why wouldn’t she listen to me?

“Can we go see The Da Vinci Code today?”

“No.”

She knew what I thought of the book.  “But I want to see the movie.  Can’t we go?”  Yes, she asked for permission at that time.  On certain occasions, Filipino custom was still a habit with her.

“No Rosemary, we can not see that movie,” I said as forcefully as I dared.  Then the sentence that I will never forget.  A sentence that changed my life:

“Dan Brown will face God some day, and he will have to answer to Him what he has written.”

Rosemary’s eyes watered.  She was probably wondering what in the world was happening to her husband.  She replied very quietly, in an almost pleading tone, “It is just a story.”

End of argument.

I could not believe what I had just told my wife.  I was dishonest to her, and deceitful.  I had tried to trick her into making her think and believe exactly as I did.  I knew that my beliefs were the correct beliefs, and there was no longer any room for compromise.  There were all sorts of movies and books that I was not allowed to view when I was younger, and The Da Vinci Code would simply just have to be part of that long list.  But then I had to step back and reflect on what I had just told Rosemary.  I was falling right back into the Fundamentalism that I had so vehemently repudiated.  I had damned Dan Brown for writing a novel that I deemed blasphemous.  I had bullied my wife into not viewing things that I did not think were good for her.  My wife.  A woman who was a grown adult and who was capable of making her own decisions.  A woman who I had sworn to be honest and faithful to.  I knew at that moment that there was something drastically wrong.  I could not continue to have a marriage like this.  I could not be the Spiritual Leader of the household if it meant ordering Rosemary to honor my own personal banned items list, attempting to mould her spiritual thoughts and beliefs by subterfuge and trick and lie to her for the sake of believing in God as I saw fit. 

I was turning into the Fundamentalist asshole that I had hated so much when I was younger.  I thought Pastor Skip Heitzig was a disgusting liar for filtering and suppressing knowledge to make me believe as he saw fit, but I caught myself doing the exact same thing with Rosemary.

The words that I said to Rosemary repeated in my head.  Dan Brown will face God some day, and he will have to answer to Him what he has written.  As if I was God All-mighty, and could pass judgment with the same Divine authority.  But in those words, I also caught myself retreating to the Fundamentalism that I had repudiated.  I thought I had escaped the poisonous belief in Divine judgement and damnation.  I thought I had matured with more enlightened, Post-Fundamentalist beliefs.  But my new enlightened beliefs were just as unjustified as my more dogmatic beliefs, and when threatened with even the slightest of challenges, I became just as dogmatic, rigid and intolerant as I had ever been.  I knew that Dan Brown was a deceptive heathen, and I had the certainty that he would have to face God with his blasphemy.  But then I realized what an arrogant prick I really was.  I was so certain about what God thought of Dan Brown, that I was willing to railroad my own wife into believing exactly as I did.  I was disgusted with myself.  I was such a fool.

After several rounds of embarrassment and apologies, I agreed to watch the movie with Rosemary.  When the house lights went up and the end credits scrolled, I realized that she was right about one thing – it really was just a silly story.  But our marriage would not survive if I was to continue acting in this way.  My Faith could not survive either.  I did not know whether to be more liberal or conservative in my religious beliefs, and they seemed to change based on how I reacted to others, not to any deep conviction of religious Faith.  I no longer knew what to do, and my home Bible Studies and Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose videos were no longer meeting my need.  I decided that if The Da Vinci Code, silly story that it was, was still able to force Evangelical churches to dispense otherwise suppressed history about its own historical foundations, then there had to be much more out there that I needed to learn.  Was my Faith correct?  Was Christianity really something worth believing in?  I had to get to the bottom of it.  I had to do it for the same reason I left Calvary Chapel 13 years before.  I had to do it for my own sanity.

Graduate school had taught me how to research topics, but astrophysics was so different from religious topics.  I had no idea where to start, but I had to start somewhere.  So I visited the La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church library and started browsing the books.

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Conversions and De-conversions - Returning to Fundamentalism

Rosemary and I continued to date, get closer, learn about each other, and fall in love.  I had been in only one serious relationship previous to meeting Rosemary, but it was nothing like this.  I began to believe that Rosemary was everything I had ever hoped or dreamed for in a woman.  I had to be cautious though.  I had thought the same thing when I met B---- nearly ten years previously, and that relationship had turned into a train wreck.  However in those ten years I had learned, through my education in physics, what critical thinking was and how to apply it when necessary.  I had applied my newly developed critical thinking skills to scientific problems on the job and at university, but I never thought to apply those same skills when evaluating a relationship.  As I stated in a previous article, I personally define critical thinking in this way:

The way to knowledge is not to find reasons why a given idea is true.  The way to knowledge is to find reasons why the idea is not true.

Back when I was dating B----, I had ignored every warning sign that our relationship was headed for failure.  I was swept up in overwhelming, passionate infatuation, and I instead clung to the many reasons I could think of why our relationship could work.  But ultimately it did not work and it was a devastating blow.  As lovely, smart, exciting, and wildly imaginative as B---- was, our relationship became a disaster simply because I refused to see the warning signs.  I refused to focus on reasons why our relationship could not work.  I was not a critical thinker.  Instead, I did the romantic thing and “followed my heart”.

I put critical thinking to the test with Rosemary.  As unromantic as it sounds, I inwardly tried to think of reasons, any reason at all, why our relationship would not work.  I vowed to myself that if I could critically evaluate, and find any reason at all why this relationship could not work, I would have to put an end to it.  I never told Rosemary at the time that I was evaluating her in this way, because I was trying to be logical and critical about a relationship that she was so passionate about.  In the end, there was only one thing I could see that could possibly cause a problem, and I faced it as honestly and rationally as I could.  It was only when I believed that the hurdle could be crossed, that I relaxed my skepticism a little.  I could think of many reasons why our relationship could work, but I could think of next to no reasons why it would not work.  There was just one small thing that we both talked about often and were both willing and open-minded enough to deal with.  We did not hide from it.  We did not keep silent about it and hope it would go away.  We confronted it head on.  We were both ready.  I left Rosemary speechless when I finally asked her to marry me.

That single hurdle that needed to be overcome was living with our different religious traditions.  Despite all the anti-Catholic propaganda that I was raised with, and all the demonization of Catholics that I had heard as an adult, I was convinced that Rosemary was just as much a Christian as I was.  I had matured enough to see that she just expressed her Christianity and her love of God differently than I did.  She helped me to understand that my religious tradition was different from hers, but that I followed a tradition nonetheless.  We both believed in the same God, both had Faith in Jesus Christ, and both relied on His shed blood to justify us before God Almighty.

Rosemary was an amazingly open-minded Catholic.  She had never been to a Protestant church before moving the United States, but met several people at her work that encouraged her to attend a liberal, independent Baptist church.  We alternated each week attending St Michael the Archangel Catholic Church, where she sang in the choir, and La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church where we came to know Pastor Alvarez.

Pastor Alvarez was not a fire and brimstone preacher, like the other Baptist preachers that I was used to from my youth.  Pastor Alvarez rarely preached on Sin or Salvation, his sermons were more geared to nurturing healthy marriages and relationships.  It made for a less stressful Sunday morning with a girl that I was hoping to impress with reasonable religious convictions.  I must confess that at the time we were dating, there was a bit of a silent competition.  Which church would win out in our relationship?  Would Rosemary become Baptist, or would I become Catholic? 

Her Catholic services took a bit of time for me to get used to.  I had read about the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation.  The elements of the Catholic mass, the wafer and wine, were not mere symbols of the sacrifice of my Savior, as they were in my Calvary Chapel denomination.  No, the elements did not merely represent, but literally became the actual substance of the blood and body of the Savior at the Priest’s invocation during mass.  I did not believe this; I never could believe this because I was not raised in this Catholic tradition.  I still clung to my belief that the elements were mere symbols of Christ’s sacrificial actions on the Cross.  I tried to listen and participate in the Catholic ritual of the Mass in a way that would allow me to incorporate them into my own beliefs.  I did not allow myself to become enveloped in the theater and mystery of the liturgy and ritual of the Mass.  I ruined it by analyzing the Mass more than I was supposed to, without first disconnecting myself from the rational world.  Analyzing the Mass ruins it in the same way too much analysis would ruin a good magic show.  I thought about everything.  I dissected it.  I tried to apply some kind of rational mechanism to the Mass to figure out how it worked. 

When the priest raised the chalice to the sky while invoking the blood of Christ, and the robed boy at his feet range a set of altar bells – I recognized the theater.  The Priest recited his chant, held the chalice of wine before him, the bells rang – all of which was designed to trigger something in the brains of the worshipers and allow them to believe that the wine was consecrated.  This is the point where the magic happens, and the wine turns to the Blood of the Deity, or so the worshipers allow themselves to believe.  The Priest held the wafer up before the congregation of worshipers  said his invoking words, the altar bells rang, presto-change, the wafer turned into the Flesh of the Deity.  After the transformation, the Priest would call out, “Let us declare the mystery of Faith”, I would chant, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again”.  I was supposed to ponder this mystery; the mystery that He had shed His blood and died at the invocation of the Priest.  But my critical brain told me that the chant, the ceremony, the ritual, the invocation, the audience participation, even the ringing of the bells at the moment of Transubstantiation, were all theater.  They were triggers for my brain to react to, that would allow me to accept this invocation as a real mystery, even a real miracle.  I never believed the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation.  Like I said, I was not raised with this tradition.  But the Priest did believe it.  After all, he was up there doing something when he thought he was transforming the elements into the essence of a god.  He was performing in a theater.  This was a magic show that we were not to analyze too harshly.  But I had ruined it with my criticism.  The fog drifted away and the illusion was revealed.  The dim was sharpened and the dull was focused.  The whole Catholic ritual was supposed to put me in a state of mind for worship.  I did not want to say that this was hypnotism, but I came close.  To this day, the invocation of the Priest reminds me of a magician saying “abra-cadabra” before his astounded audience.

I tried to make up ways to transfer the Catholic ritual into something that more closely resembled my own Protestant tradition.  I was accustomed to my Protestant tradition of communion, where tiny individual cups of grape juice and thinly diced pieces of Wonder Bread were passed out to all the worshipers for us to partake in unison.  In the Catholic Mass, the elements were dispensed from the front by lay ministers, with all the wine drunk from a single, large chalice.  No matter – the method by which the elements were dispensed was not too important to me.  I believed the wine and bread were mere symbols, and I decided to take the elements seriously in that manner.  I once felt like collecting the bread to eat privately in the pew while saying a prayer.  I took the wafer back to the seat, kneeled to pray, and I was interrupted by one of the lay ministers.  “What have you done with the Host?!!?”  She saw that I had taken it back to the seat, and had to investigate what I had done to that most holy sacramental bread.  I learned that day that this host was to be eaten before the lay minister or priest who dispensed it, and was not in any other way to be tampered with.  It also struck me as strange that there was never a line of people to partake from the chalice of wine, or the Blood of Christ.  The long lines were to the wafers, or the Body of Christ.  I personally viewed the wine as more important than the bread, since the Blood of Christ was what imparted salvation to us mortals.  I asked Rosemary why so few people, including herself, ever drank of the wine from the chalice.  “I think people are afraid of germs.  Everybody is drinking from the same cup.”  That never crossed my mind.  I figured God would protect everybody from getting sick after drinking form the Blood of His own Son, and I was surprised so many people thought the consecrated Blood of Jesus might have kooties.  I have never been queasy about such things.  I always drank from the chalice.  Silly people….

In the meantime, much to my satisfaction, Rosemary was becoming more enamored with La Puerta del Cielo Baptist.  Pastor Alvarez kept his sermons relatively short, insightful and humorous, but still more substantial than the inane Catholic homilies I had to endure.  Rosemary was impressed that the people in La Puerta del Cielo were generally more friendly, more personable, more likely to become friends with.  And become friends we did. 

Pastor Alvarez emphasized that home groups and Bible Studies were the backbone of his church, so I started hosting them in my house.  It was not long before I had a dozen or so people coming to my house once per week for prayer and study.  I had initially wanted to stick to expository Bible Study as I was used to doing in Calvary Chapel, but I was discouraged from doing this.  Pastor Alvarez warned us that studying the Bible verse by verse, with no guidance or structure, could lead to trouble.  This made little sense to me at the time.  Wasn’t the Holy Spirit supposed to guide his Faithful in our instruction of Scripture?  Wasn’t there a single interpretation to the Scriptures that the Spirit would point us towards?  If we simply put our faith in Jesus, and trusted the Holy Spirit to guide is in His Word, what could we possibly fear?

No matter.  I was given a series of tapes from the church recording library that would help our home Bible study.  The tapes came with workbooks and self-instructional guides.  I was already suspicious of these things.  It is funny looking back at it now, how those old residual fears of extra-Biblical influences that were pounded into me in Calvary Chapel over ten years before were creeping back into the forethought of my brain.  I had spent several years in University; I had exposed myself to all sorts of diverse ideas and traditions; I had even learned important critical thinking skills that I never had when attending Calvary Chapel.  Yet despite all that exposure, I suddenly found myself again surrounded by Fundamentalist Christians, and that company of believers began to pull those old triggers again.  If I was to study the Bible, I did not need workbooks or guides.  I just needed the Bible, prayer and the Holy Spirit to guide me.  But in the end, I did not make waves in my new Baptist church, and I went reluctantly with their program.  So I started hosting my home Bible study with a lecture tape series from an Evangelical pastor that was taking the Evangelical sub-culture by storm in 2003.  It was Rick Warren and his 40 Days of Purpose taped curriculum.

I had never heard of Rick Warren, but suddenly his book The Purpose Driven Life seemed to be everywhere.  I recognized it as the latest Christian fad, and I had tried very hard to keep passing fads and gimmicks out of my Christian walk back when I was in Calvary Chapel.  I vowed not to buy it, but I was surprised on Christmas 2003 with a gift from Rosemary.  I undid the wrapper, and there it was.  My Catholic girlfriend Rosemary had also become enamored with Rick Warren and his Purpose Driven Life.  Her handwritten note on the inside cover began:

“To the man I love dearly – May this book be an inspiration for you to discover how special and wonderful you are…”

So I led our home Bible Study group with selections from Rick Warren’s tapes, books and the Bible.  I thought something felt disingenuous about putting Pastor Warren on such a high pedestal when I felt we should have been studying the Bible at a Bible Study.  It was like he was our surrogate pastor in our home, and we could not allow the Holy Spirit to guide us instead.  I felt uneasy, but I decided to learn from Pastor Warren what I could.  I also mingled it with attendance every other week for Mass at St Michael the Archangel to listen to Rosemary’s choir singing and participate in the Eucharist ritual.  The Fundamentalist that had been dormant inside me for over ten years started to reawaken.  I had learned so much, I had vowed to become more open-minded, I recognized the traditions in my own brand of Christianity, but in the end I had to retreat to that only tradition of Christianity that I knew.  I was no longer completely comfortable with it, but it was all I had and the only thing I could believe. 

Since we were not exclusively studying the Bible in our home Bible Study, I decided to once again, for the first time in over ten years, go to the Source of all my Christian belief and knowledge.  I needed the Spirit.  I needed Jesus and only Jesus.  I knew Jesus only through the Bible.  I needed the Bible that I had neglected for the better part of a decade.  I had previously read the Bible twice in its entirety, but I had done this back in the height of my religious fervor, as a follower of Skip Heitzig in the denomination of Calvary Chapel.  Watching Rick Warren videos during Bible Study left me feeling parched and dry.  I picked up my New King James Bible.  I started in Genesis.  “In the beginning….”

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My Martin Luther King Day annual ritual

Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day, everybody!

I have made it an annual ritual to read Martin Luther King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' as my MLK day celebration. It is not only to remember the courage of the man, and to be inspired by the power and force of the letter. It is also to commemorate the personal impact that the letter had on me, 5 years ago, when I read a small portion of the letter to our small-group Bible study. The reaction of my fellow Christians to that letter, and my contemplation of the rest of the letter and on the life of Martin Luther King Jr, was the initial calalyst of my doubting of the Faith, and which ultimately led to my abandonment of that Faith altogether.

I encourage everybody to read Letter from Birmingham Jail, and remember the conditions that a large percentage of our population lived under just a few decades ago, to be optimistic about the progress we have made, and vigilant about the work still to be done in the struggle for human rights.

You may find the full text of The Letter from Birmingham Jail HERE.

In the meantime, I want to re-post two blog articles that I wrote back in March 2007, in which I wrote a short book review on a biography I had read on the life of MLK, and also the impact that the Letter from Birmingham Jail had on my small-group Bible Study and on my Christian life. Here they are, back to back:



Let the Trumpet Sound
The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. by Stephen B. Oates

This is one of the books that started my doubting slide. This is a major catalyst for my current trend away from my beliefs. I have always had questions and doubts, but this book forced me to confront those doubts head-on, to take them from under the rug, and re-evaluate my beliefs in Christianity.

Last year, I was convicted by my ignorance of the world around me. I am educated, yet I knew next to nothing about the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. So I picked up this 500 page biography of Martin Luther King, published in 1982. I was immediately struck by the very recent history of this country, the history we have all heard a little about, but I think may not have studied in much detail. Black Americans were treated like animals in the Southern US as recently as the 1960s, and this book makes that point clear. King was a brilliant young minister from Atlanta who held his first pastoral duties in Birmingham, Alabama. Holding a PhD in systematic theology, King was highly academic, and initially approached his sermons in an intellectual manner. But Birmingham was the in the heart of racism and segregation. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, Birmingham erupted into violence and protest. King really struggled to keep is church and ideology focused on Jesus, heaven, salvation of souls and the afterlife. But he was forced to concede that a church which does no good for humanity while on earth is not a church at all. He went full throttle into social activism and civil rights and never looked back. The book, and King's life and activism is too full to summarize beyond this point. Pick it up at the library, and read it for yourself.

Bottom line - this book is excellent. I recommend it to anyone who values history and our relationship with our fellow humans. If I have one criticism, it is that the book nearly deifies King, and glosses over his very real failings, such as infidelity to his wife. That is a small complaint though. Read it.

But the real question is, what is this book review doing on a site which questions the claims of Christianity? What are the spiritual applications? Like I said, this book is one of the catalysts for my move away from Christianity. I will write about that in my next article – so stay tooooned.


Let the Trumpet Sound
The Life of Martin Luther King Jr., by Stephen B. Oates

This is part 2 of my review of this outstanding book. If you have not yet done so, head on out to the library and check this thing out. It is on my top 10 list from last year.

Now, here is how it affected me spiritually.

Last year I was content with my Christian beliefs, and holding small group Bible studies in my home. I had (and still have) good friends who attended. We shared life experiences together, talked and prayed about showing Christian love to the world, then .. talked and prayed about it some more. I went to a Baptist church which focused its energies on strengthening families and relationships, which is great. But I was a little unsettled. It all seemed too secure and comfortable. Rallying our small group to go give aid to the elderly, or visit the retirement home (one of my favorite things to do) became a real chore. We would plan, organize and plan and plan until we had planned things to death, and never do much of anything. And I am not trashing my friends, because I was just as guilty of apathy as anyone in our group. I had the best of intentions, but in the end it cost too much time. Time is a precious resource. Giving money is relatively easy – but time is very difficult.

Reading about MLK was seriously convicting to my Christian faith on that basis. This was a man who gave up everything for what he believed, even to the point of neglecting his family (which I could never do – nor intend to do). My brand of Christianity seemed tepid and too easy. King, and many others gave their lives to make the world aware of the injustices of the world, and to protest for change. King was a huge admirer and follower of Mahatma Gandhi, who lived as Christlike a life as anyone who ever walked the face of the earth. But how is Christ working in my life to make the world better? No, I don’t mean to be another MLK, that is just silly. Just doing my share to help the desparately poor who live just across the border from me, to help the handicapped children ministry, or visit the elderly and sick? Is the Holy Spirit really empowering me or any of my other Christian friends with the Fruit of the Spirit any more than my good and respectable, but non-believing nieghbors?

In 1963, MLK was arrested (again) for peacefully protesting segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. While he was in jail, eight white pastors from around the state wrote the local newspaper, and editorialized against King’s activism. They figured he should be a good preacher, stay behind the pulpit, and keep his nose out of trouble. In response, King wrote what came to be known as Letter from Birmingham Jail on scaps of paper, and smuggled out by his lawyer bit by bit while he was in solitary confinement. This section from Letter from Birmingham Jail will stay with me always:

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators"' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Wow. An irrelevant social club. That hurt. I read this powerful letter as though it were written directly to my Baptist Church, to my friends and to myself. It really hurt. I even brought it to my small group and read the above passage to my friends before Bible Study. I wanted to motivate them into some kind of conviction of our condition, but it was met by my Spirit Empowered friends with general apathy. So we fell into our routine, and read a couple of verses from the end of James about loving and praying for the sick among us.

After that, I could no longer go back to my old Baptist church. I viewed my brand of Christianity to be empty, nearly vacuous, and not doing myself nor anyone else much good. The Holy Spirit, I felt, was not empowering me nor anyone else to do anything. I came to realize that if I wanted to do good for my neighbors, I needed to just stop praying, reading Bible passages and being a pious piss-ant and JUST DO IT. Funny thing is, my wife agreed with me without even reading the book. Some of us have natural insights that others do not.

The faith story goes on from there, and it continues to unwind to this day. But that is how this book enters into the story. That is a strange way to begin questioning my own beliefs. But as a loving and charitable old friend of mine once said, “I would love to be a nun, if it were not for all that belief in God that comes with it”.