Conversions and De-converions - Slash and Burn

Penchansky’s Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible was the first book in my new journey.  It was exhilarating.  I was reading things about my Bible that I never could have imagined.  Polytheism?  The Bible has more than one god?  Absolutely – Penchansky just had to show me where to look, and I definitely found that polytheism is in there.  Inconceivable!  I was not convinced by everything Penchansky or anybody else said for the sake of it being counter to anything I had known before.  But I came to understand that there was a possibility that everything I had understood about God, about Jesus, the Bible, everything had another side to the story.  I was discovering that there was so much more that I had never learned from a single pastor or Bible teacher, and that I would never learn unless I ignored all the warnings of ‘worldly wisdom’ from Pastor Skip, went to the library myself and did my own digging.

I was 42 years old, and I was as enthused as any youngster who was on the verge of an exciting intellectual discovery.  I remember the thrill of first reading about and understanding Chaos Theory or Quantum Mechanics some fifteen years before.  There was once a time when I had stayed up late into the night reading and pondering on this newly discovered knowledge that few other people could claim to understand.  It was more than any of my family, friends or anybody I had grown up with had ever known before, and that had made anything that challenged what I thought I knew about the world to be a thrilling intellectual adventure.  It was the thrill of having my mind expanded, my vistas broadened, and learning something that only a privileged few who put forth the effort could know.  I felt that thrill again in early 2006, when everything I thought I knew about my religious beliefs was rattled from the foundation.  I felt the pull of my own ignorance.  The more I learned, the more insignificant I felt.  There was more out there in the world than I could ever hope to absorb.  I simply could not get enough.

I was not a young, angry rebel who was looking for a way to shake off the confines of my religion.  I had no desire to start ‘living a life of sin’, as so many offended Christians would imagine of me.  None of these supposed motivations were anywhere on my radar.  ‘Sinning’ was not my motivation.  I had just turned 42 years old.  It was my first year of marriage to a woman I desperately loved.  I was attending two different churches, keeping close to my Fundamentalist faith, and learning to appreciate Rosemary’s Catholic traditions.  We were hosting weekly Bible studies in our home, and I loved all the people we met from the two churches we attended.  I had no reason to rebel against anything in my life.  But I had to face the fact that Christianity, as I knew it, was not working in my life anymore.   As much as I had tried to deny it, it had not worked in years.   I could no longer naively accept what I was being told from the pulpit, as I once had.  But to cut my skepticism even deeper, I now could no longer naively accept what was even in the Bible itself!  The very Fountainhead of my Faith, the Holy Scriptures, also had to come under my intense scrutiny. 

Penchansky challenged me to try reading the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, not as a historical or theological description of mankind’s Fall into a state of Original Sin, but as mythology no different from any other mythology of antiquity.  Instead of accepting my religion’s official interpretation of this sacred story as the origin of mankind’s eternal and defiant separation from God Almighty and the corruption of the natural order, I tried reading the story only as it stood in the text.  Try imagining Yahweh as only one in a pantheon of deities who created humans for the tending of His garden.  Inside His garden is a magical tree, the fruit of which gives the innocent couple a sense of self-aware morality.  The curses that Yahweh inflicts on his creatures are myths to explain why men must work and toil in life, why women must labor in childbirth and be subservient to men, and why snakes crawl around with no legs.  I had fought for years to somehow interpret the Adam and Eve story in a way that would not violate either my imposed religious dogma of Original Sin, or my scientific understanding of evolution and the origins of Homo Sapiens.  Each attempt at reconciliation was so unsuccessful, that over time I simply resorted to the ‘somehow – someway’ interpretation that they both must be simultaneously true.  Penchansky challenged me to look at the same story as ancient, polytheistic myth, no different from the fantastic myths of the Greeks and Romans.  I had long thought that the story fell in some genre of inspired myth, but one that ultimately pointed to Christian doctrine.  But if I tried, even just for the sake of argument, not to impose later Christian dogma onto the ancient story of Adam and Eve, and just let the story speak for itself, the interpretation of the text became simple and obvious.  Suddenly, the story made sense.  It worked.  It fit perfectly within a pre-scientific world that routinely generated myths to explain natural phenomena.  So much the worse for that part of Christian dogma.  Christian dogma was what I was scrutinizing.  If it was not working, I figured – tough luck.  It had to go.  If I could find a simpler model, a less contrived explanation to what had been impossible to put together, I figured that one was more likely to be true. 

So, one chip at a time, inspiration and inerrancy was removed from the Bible.  From here, it seemed that everything about my Christian religion collapsed all at once.  The doctrine of the Biblical Inerrancy was very fast to go.  I had seen ‘alleged’ contradictions in the Bible, but I had been trained with plenty of apologetic talking points that would save my Bible from embarrassment.  It was not until I started reading library books, then buying them for myself, that I discovered just how many problems there really were with the Biblical text, and just how ludicrous most of my canned responses to them were.  Biblical inerrancy went fast.  I was still a Christian, at least I still felt like one, but I knew my Faith was going to go through a rapid transformation.  I was vaguely aware by this time that I might even have to discard my Faith completely.  For some reason, I do not remember being particularly afraid.  I knew that my intentions were honest and sincere.  I knew that I was not looking for an excuse to sin.  I knew that I did not hate God.  I was just fed up with being confused, miserable, and forcing myself to settle with unsatisfactory answers.  I just wanted to get to the bottom of what my religion was really all about and to cut through the lies that I knew I was being fed from the pulpit.

I was more afraid of my friends and family than I was of God.  Rosemary was certainly concerned.  Since she was a Catholic, I don’t think she ever understood my bizarre obsession with understanding the Bible.  It seemed that every day, my reading and research led me to some new unsolvable problem with Biblical inerrancy.  After enumerating everything I had just discovered about the contradictions, for instance, between the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ trail and crucifixion, my suffering wife would just seek to make peace rather than argue. 

Rosemary could tell me, “Yes, yes, they wrote their gospel stories differently, didn’t they?  Maybe they just wrote from their own perspectives, and could never get all the tiny details exactly the same.  I am sure those were busy times with lots of confusion and intrigues.  Nobody could have gotten it exactly right!”  I had by then learned that there were plenty of reasons why the differences between the four Gospels should be concerning to a person trying to preserve inerrancy, but I never argued with her.  I just did my best to listen to her point of view, and take from it what I could.  But she really did not know what to say to me.  She did not know what it would take to ease my doubts.  She had been raised in a religious environment that emphasized Faith as the ultimate virtue, and unlike my tradition, never looked to the Bible for evidence of her Faith.  Looking for evidence would make her a doubter.  If she was to be a Catholic, she was to believe, Bible or no Bible, evidence or no evidence, and that was all there was to it.  She did not understand why I would begin doubting after finding Biblical discrepancies or contradictions.  To her, such things were unimportant and irrelevant.  I did my best to explain to her that I was on my own religious and spiritual quest.  I needed to find out what was best for me, and what I could understand as truth to my best satisfaction.  I believed that to be the best husband that I could be, I needed to be honest with my convictions and with her.  Although she was concerned for me, I tried to reassure her that my beliefs were mine alone, and I would never force her to believe exactly as I did.  Rosemary was incredibly patient with me during this time.  I am sure it was a stressful situation for her.  We had married with different religious traditions from the start.  Now less than a year into our marriage, she could tell I was headed for some kind of drastic change.

We continued hosting weekly Bible studies in our home, but I think everybody in the room was feeling the tensions of my changing beliefs.  I never kept any thought or doubt secret from Rosemary.  I was not ashamed to show her the books that I was then reading.  But I kept everything secret from my Bible study group and anybody else at La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church.  Instead of venting my doubts to my Bible study group, I presented them with some challenges that I had suddenly been made aware of to see how any one of them would react.  Many Fundamentalists are particularly sensitive to the charge that their Scriptures contain contradictions, so every now and again I thought I would challenge the members of my Bible study group with a bit of a problem.  Inevitably, the only person who responded to my challenges was our group leader, Dave.  Everybody else sat in tense silence.  A typical challenge would go something like:

Me: I know that there are no real contradictions in the Bible, only ‘seeming’ contradictions, so what is your opinion of salvation by grace versus salvation by works.  I grew up believing in Grace Alone, but Rosemary grew up as a Catholic, and that God’s grace allows us to do good works, but ultimately we have to work out our own salvation.  So who is right?

John: The Bible says that we are saved by grace alone.

Me: What about the problem between Paul in Romans and James.  I read both, and it really like they are saying two different things.

John:  No.  Paul is saying that we are saved by God’s grace.  James is saying that our works are the evidence that we are saved through God’s grace.

Of course I had heard this apologetic countless times before, but I did not want to needlessly press the issue with my study group.  I was not trying to cause problems with them, or cause any of them to doubt with me.  I was just interested to see if they had anything new or more compelling to offer than the usual apologetics that I was finding increasingly unconvincing.  I never told my group that I had noticed the common strategy of ironing over contradictions by inserting things into the Biblical text that were not there.  I figured that the doubts swimming in my head were far beyond anything my poor group was equipped to deal with.  Both Paul and James reference Abraham as a model of salvation, but Paul uses that model to say, explicitly, that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).  James uses that same model to say, explicitly, that we “see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” (James 2:24).   My study group responded to this nasty theological problem with the common apologetic tactic of making James say things that I did not see in the text of his epistle. 

I felt that if there was this much controversy, with my Fundamentalist traditions interpreting these texts one way, and Rosemary’s Catholic traditions interpreting them differently, then what good reason did I have to choose one interpretation over the other?  What good reason did anybody have to choose a favored interpretation of ambiguous texts, except by appealing to a favored religious tradition?  But even if my friends were right, and James said that works were only an evidence that we were in fact saved by Faith alone, how do we Christians know how many good works are enough to count as evidence of our own salvation?  I knew plenty of non-Christians, especially in my university years, who were definitely not Christians, but whose outward actions made them indistinguishable from Christians.  So if works are the evidence of salvation in a Christian, and the Christian finds himself not performing enough works that he feels would be a manifest result of his Faith, he will be forced to perform more good works, just to prove he is in fact saved!  I had struggled with this problem many times over the years.  I had to believe that I was saved only through my Faith in Jesus, and not to rely on my good works for salvation.  But if I did not do enough good works, I did not have solid evidence that I was in fact being sanctified into the image of Christ.  So I would have to perform more good works to demonstrate my sanctification.  As a result chasing my tail like this, I could not tell the difference between works and faith.  It was all just ridiculous semantics that I was basing my salvation on.  I feared that my home Bible study group would suspect my doubts had increased to an unacceptable level.

But what about my Christian friends?  If they wanted to say they were saved, and that their good works were evidence of salvation, I should have expected to see that evidence manifest in how they lived their lives.  But from what I saw, their morality was nothing markedly different from anything saw in the typical, non-believing heathen.  If anybody stood out as moral paragons, it was some of my Catholic friends who had devoted enormous amounts of effort and sacrifice into border justice, all done in the name of Christ.  These were the same Christians who criticized my strong focus on the Bible.  Yet, my Fundamentalist friends constantly spoke of grace, faith, and our works manifesting the sanctifying work of the Spirit, yet they evidenced nothing that demonstrated some supernatural Force compelling them to divine service.  Outside of church and Bible study, they acted pretty much the same as anybody else.  Where was this ‘works as evidence’ of divine grace?  If Christians were in fact indistinguishable from non-Christians, how could their works be any evidence of their supposed salvation? 

Our home Bible study had stagnated into a half hour or so of exploring a theme in the Bible, asking everybody to volunteer their opinions on a few selected scriptures, then gather group prayer.  How many decades had I spent repeating this same material over and over again?  How many different ways can we repeat the constant refrain – we are sinners, Jesus is the Savior, He died to bare our sins, and we now need to accept His salvation?  How many times must we dredge up Scriptures that convict us to love our neighbor, to seek His higher glory, to pray without ceasing, etc, etc?  I felt that there were only so many ways to express the same things over and over again, and I was afraid that some of the more, shall we say, emotionally needy believers in our small study group were leaning far too heavily on the wisdom of our group leader, John.  With a limited number of scriptures that could be referred to in a finite book like the Bible, I felt that stagnation was inevitable, and these people had become complacent in constantly hearing the same thing.  They asked questions of our group leader, but I suspect they knew what the answers were before they asked, and would have been disappointed if they received an answer that they did not expect.  Complacency in my Faith was the one thing that I was trying to escape from.  Fed up and frustrated with this seeming over-reliance on Faith at the expense of Works, I decided to test my home study group with another kind of challenge.  

Martin Luther King Day had just passed, so I decided to read a small excerpt from Dr. King’s classic of activist literature, his powerful Letter from Birmingham Jail.  I had just recently finished reading a biography of his life, and I was gripped by how much he had sacrificed for the cause of racial justice, and by how powerfully he was empowered by his religious beliefs.  In 1963, King was arrested for protesting segregation laws in Birmingham, Alabama.  While he was in jail, eight white pastors from around the state wrote the local Birmingham 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 racial justice and activism.  In response, King wrote from solitary confinement what came to be known as Letter from Birmingham Jail on scraps of paper, and smuggled out by his lawyer bit by bit.  King’s letter detailed his commitment to using the Church as an empowered vehicle that I thought made our comfortable Christian apathy pathetic in comparison.   Would my fellow Christians be as affected by Dr. King’s letter as I was?  I gave my study group a short background of the history behind Dr. King’s letter, then read to them this excerpt:

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.

I told them that this letter had a powerful effect on me, and I waited for their response.  I was not expecting an instant moral commitment to social justice.  I was just expecting a comment for discussion.  Perhaps somebody in my group could tell me what Dr. King’s letter and message had to say about our modern church, specifically ours, who had the same concerns of falling into apathy and irrelevance.  What I did not expect was the room full of blank stares and tepid nods of accent and agreement.  I could not even get an honest opinion from these people who believed that their morality and works were manifest evidence of their personal salvation.  These people had no desire or intention to have their convictions challenged, even by a fellow Christian like Martin Luther King!  They clearly were not interested in Spiritual growth or any kind of moral challenge.  My spiritually empowered and sanctified Christian brethren only wanted to coddle themselves up to the same familiar, warm and simmering pot of stewed ingredients that they had been born and raised with.  I loved them all, but I had to be honest with what I was seeing.  The evidence of works that the Spirit had made manifest in these fellow Christians was nothing more than a pathetic dependence on comfort food.  These people had nothing to offer me, and I did not want to be content with their spiritual complacency.  I was searching because I was no longer satisfied with living a spiritual life of doubts, concerns and questions.  The familiar Fundamentalism of my home Bible study group and La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church had nothing more to offer me.

Simultaneous with these events was my discovery of the Internet.  I have never been especially enamored of electronic gadgets in my house.  I did have a boom-box to listen to music, but that is about where the technology ended.  In 2006, I still had my rotary telephone and no television.  I certainly did not have a home computer!  Rosemary would have none of my aversion to technology, and had the Internet installed in our house around the time we started hosting the weekly Bible studies.  I had used the Internet quite a bit as a research tool at work and when I was attending university.  I had no intention or desire of ever using it for personal use, until I saw a need to do some personally important research.  I discovered that there was an endless supply of the apologetics that I had come to despise.  I discovered that Chuck Missler was still around, and still selling the ‘briefing packages’ that I had practically memorized back in the early ‘90s.  I already knew that stuff.  I needed to be challenged with something different.  I remember naively typing ‘Bible Contradictions’ into the search engine.  What a mammoth mistake that was!  I discovered that there were a lot of irrational and unwarranted criticisms of Christianity that seemed to come from very angry people.  I did my best to avoid emotional ranting that contained obvious lies.  But I eventually found two sites that were instrumental in my ultimate departure from Christianity.

Infidels.org introduced me to the works of Robert Ingersoll.  I had never heard of Ingersoll, and had no idea who he was when I started browsing the lectures stored at infidels.org.  Robert Ingersoll, polemicist and orator, toured the United States during the turn of the century, back during the time when public lectures were a form of entertainment.  I opened something from Ingersoll called Heretics and Hericies, only one of dozens of his public lectures in print, and started reading:

Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. This word was born of the hatred, arrogance and cruelty of those who love their enemies, and who, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. This word was born of intellectual slavery in the feudal ages of thought. It was an epithet used in the place of argument. From the commencement of the Christian era, every art has been exhausted and every conceivable punishment inflicted to force all people to hold the same religious opinions. This effort was born of the idea that a certain belief was necessary to the salvation of the soul. Christ taught, and the church still teaches that unbelief is the blackest of crimes. God is supposed to hate with an infinite and implacable hatred, every heretic upon the earth, and the heretics who have died are supposed at this moment to be suffering the agonies of the damned. The church persecutes the living and her God burns, for all eternity, the dead…

I had a visceral gut reaction to what I was reading.  It felt like an emotional gag reflex.  It was one of the very few times that I was offended by the blasphemy of what I was reading.  I felt the strong urge to choke on what I was reading, to look away from the horrors of heresy.  No!  I had to force myself to override the instinct to look away from what was on the page before me, and rather ask myself if there was anything in Ingersoll’s shocking words that were not accurate.  Was my revulsion due to reading lies and distortions, or was I reading ugly truth?  Is it not true that, for instance, “Christ taught, and the church still teaches that unbelief is the blackest of crimes”?  Was Ingersoll correct when he said, “Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak”?  I knew very well about purges and inquisitions of the past.  But even if heretics are not now persecuted to the extent that they were in the past, Ingersoll was still correct about the Church’s hatred of heresies.  After all, why was I hiding my own heretical thoughts and opinions from my small Bible study group?  Was I not afraid of their hatred of my unorthodox thoughts?  I had to accept that Ingersoll was not stretching the truth.  He was expressing Christianity’s hatred of heresies and originality and freethought in highly charged and polemical prose.  This is what public speakers do.  It did not make it any less true.  I was fascinated with what critical evaluation of Christian texts and traditions had to offer, and how it expanded my mind to new ideas about my Faith.  But the bluntness of Ingersoll’s polemics forced me not to sugar-coat what the outcomes of my changing Faith really were, and where I was headed.  I was becoming the subject of countless condemning sermons from the pulpit.  I was becoming a heretic.  I may have been intimidated by my fellow Christians, but I was no longer afraid of God.  Was I becoming hard of heart, like Pharaoh’s defiance against God?  Was I in the process of being handed over to a reprobate mind?  Perhaps, but I had lost all my guilt and fear of Divine judges.  I was not afraid of Him because I knew I was being honest.  If anything, I knew that my integrity was intact.

One other website that I must mention, pummeled my senses with a blunt question - Why won't God heal amputees?  Reading in particular a long article which addressed this question, brought me back nearly twenty years before to a Calvary Chapel service in which believers were sharing their stories of miraculous healing.  As I have written about in a previous article of this series, one man shared how he had prayed for the healing of a friend’s severed hand.  When he shared with us that he had seen that hand grow back with his very eyes, Pastor Skip quickly intervened to quiet his obviously deluded testimony and end the sharing of miraculous stories.  It seemed strange to me at the time why everybody would believe stories of healed colds, bad backs, even cancer remission, or anything else that had one thing in common - that any testimony could conceivably occur with no miraculous intervention.  But nobody, not me, not even Pastor Skip, believed a sincere, faithful and enthusiastic story that involved something truly miraculous.  I was finally ready to confront the question of why Christians never pray for the healing of amputees, the mentally retarded, the Alzheimer patient, or any other person in which there was no chance of natural remission.  When the question was raised in Calvary Chapel, I ignored the obvious implications, and brushed them under a rug.  But fifteen years later, I was finally ready to examine those questions again.  I pulled them back out from the rug and the answers were immediately obvious to me.  Christians, at least every Christian I had ever personally encountered, only prayed for things that would take no faith to believe would be answered.  Nobody prayed for the healing of our Bible study leader’s autistic son.  Nobody ever prays for the regeneration of severed limbs.  Nobody ever prays for new skin on a 3^rd degree burn patient.  We all know that those prayers will never be answered.  But why shouldn’t they be answered?  The entire Universe will be just as insignificant as a speck of lint to a Being of infinite scope.   Healing a head cold and healing a congenital birth defect should be pretty much the same thing to a Creature of unlimited power.  So why, why did we never pray for those miraculous things that would unquestionably demonstrate His existence and majesty?  Why shouldn’t a prayer for the resurrection of a still-born fetus be just as common as a prayer for the relief of an aching back?  

I knew the answer why.  I think that deep down, we all knew the answer why, and we always knew it.  But it took me decades to accept that grim fact of my Faith in the Almighty.  We never prayed those prayers because we knew they would never be answered.  We only prayed for those things which would not make a mockery of our magical genie in the bottle.  We only prayed for those things that take no faith at all.  We even append each prayer with ‘…but Your will be done’ just in case, because we also know that even pathetic, faithless prayers are only answered with no greater certainty than random chance.

Looking back at the year 2006, I am shocked at how fast my Christian Faith collapsed.  I never intended to stop believing.  I was not out to look for an excuse to stop believing.  I did not know this intense ‘spiritual quest’ of skepticism and scrutiny of my religious beliefs would lead to my eventual abandonment of those beliefs.  I caught myself by surprise when I realized that I no longer believed.  I knew that my beliefs were changing, and I knew that I would not come out of this skeptical period with the same Fundamentalist beliefs I had held before.  I initially welcomed that change and I was not afraid of where it would eventually end up.  I had no idea it would end in non-belief!  I was expecting to wind up, perhaps, as an enlightened Catholic Christian, which was just fine by me.  All I wanted was to believe in something that I could be honest with, and not have to lie about or tie my brain into logical knots to justify.  Finally, I wanted to believe in something that would be attractive to my wife and hopefully be compatible with her beliefs.  I wanted a happy and successful marriage, and I needed some religious framework that would make our relationship stronger in the coming years.  So I merrily went along, reading everything I could get my hands on that looked intelligent and skeptical, yet fair to my Christian Faith.  I did not know until it was too late how quickly my Faith had completely eroded away.

The shock of what I was doing to myself finally came early one morning sometime in summer 2006.  Rosemary was asleep next to me in bed.  I was up early, reading a book that gripped me like a best-selling suspense novel.  I remember reading in that book about the various forms of early Christian beliefs that existed in the first centuries after Jesus walked the earth.  Bart Ehrman’s book Lost Christianities demonstrated to me that the ancient Mediterranean was a cornucopia of religions, mythologies, saviors, miracles, god-men and pagan beliefs.  Ehrman demonstrated from the numerous writings that are preserved from the ancient Mediteranean world, including the New Testament itself, that the Christian milieu was awash in various types of Gnostics, Marcionites, Encratites, Docetics, Ebionites, and other extinct forms of Christian heresies.  Ehrman showed that what later became Orthodox Christianity most likely sprung out of this syncretistic stew like the first strands of primitive DNA had once steamed out of chemical reactions in thermal vents and magma flows.

I lay next to my sleeping wife.  I put the book down momentarily, dumbstruck at what I had just then realized.  “Oh no,” I whispered to myself.  “Joe, what are you going to believe?  What are you going to believe?”  It was a stunning moment.  I knew then where I was.  Rather, I knew where I was not. 

One evening in 1988, I had walked behind the Calvary Chapel stage in Albuquerque, New Mexico to make a firm commitment to Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  I had cried and slobbered my way through the Sinner’s Prayer, convicted and repentant of my sins, and ready to live a new life for Jesus.  F there is any such thing as an ‘Apostate’s Prayer’, I said it to myself that morning in 2006, with Ehrman’s Lost Christianities open in front of me. 

“Joe, what are you going to believe?” 

I did not know quite what to believe.  But I knew, right then and there, that I did not believe a single thing I had once thought was true of God, Jesus, The Bible.  Heaven or Hell.  The sanctification of the saints and the inherent virtues of holding to the Christian Faith.  In that moment, it was gone.  All gone.  Slash and burn and start all over again.  All those years – all that time and effort and expense of holding up a belief system to mold everything in my life into – all of that was gone.  I realized it all at in just that moment.

I momentarily panicked.  But it did not last long.  I guess that was how it felt to be abandoned by God and “given up unto vile affections” (Romans 1:26).  I felt the breathing of my sleeping wife lying next to me, and I turned the page to expose myself to more damnable heresies.

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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 – The Filtered Bible

Rosemary had never really read the Bible.  Her Catholic background never encouraged her to read the raw, unfiltered Biblical text.  She only read from selected readings and portions chosen for her by some anonymous men in Rome.  But she managed to bluff her way through our Baptist led home Bible studies.  There was one particularly uncomfortable evening at our home Bible study where we fervent Evangelicals were discussing our favorite portions of the Holy Scriptures.

For instance, my favorites have long been John chapter 10 and Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians.  Other people expressed their favorites, and we all nodded with fond agreement.  “Ah yes!  I love Romans as well!  So deep…”  It was finally Rosemary’s turn to speak and somebody asked her to gush over her favorite part of the Bible.  She stumbled.  I knew she was in trouble, but the singer and choir performer in her pulled something out.  “I have always loved the Psalms.  I love the singing and poetry.”  “Ah yes!  The Psalms…” our Bible study group again nodded in approval.

In private, I knew that Rosemary only knew the basics of the Bible.  She could list off the most elementary bullet points, like Paul’s letters and the four Gospels.  But if given a Bible she could never find them without first consulting the table of contents in the front.  What is a sure way to spot a true Bible believing Fundamentalist?  Easy.  They can instantly find obscure books like Haggai or Philemon with a mere flip of a few pages in their Bibles.  But what Rosemary lacked in Biblical knowledge, she made up for in sincere devotion to her beloved Deity.  She loved prayer during our home Bible studies, and she felt free to dispense of the Catholic prayer regimen of repeating the Rosary.  She relished the Baptist tradition of bypassing the endless cycles and intermediary prayers to the Saints and instead boldly approaching the throne of God for a direct talk with her all-loving Deity.  Rosemary loved this devotional prayer time, and she always prayed with much enthusiasm during our Bible studies.  At the time, she seemed to enjoy the Rick Warren 40 Days of Purpose videos that our home Bible study was watching.  But her weak spot was the actual Bible readings.  I think she felt a little embarrassed by her ignorance when surrounded by fervent, Bible believing Baptists.

She once asked me if we could have a private Bible study session at home, just for the two of us.  My heart leapt.  My Catholic girlfriend was interested in the fountainhead of my religious beliefs.  Maybe she would come around to my side after all, and leave Catholicism as a cultural vestige.  Maybe we could at least meet halfway, with my growing, but not complete, interest in her Catholic Faith. 

I had previously read the entire Bible twice, both times while attending Calvary Chapel nearly a decade before.  At the time, I read the Bible as one would read a novel, with the only difference being that it was preceded by much prayer to the supposed Author.  I had a tendency to read the Bible only to retain an over-arching idea of what was actually in the text.  I rarely dug into details.  I did not compare and crosscheck one text with another.  If there was a gap left in the life of Jesus as presented in the Gospel of Matthew, it could easily be filled with something I found in the Gospel of Mark.  If the long list of requirements for the Tabernacle or Priestly garments in Exodus became tedious, I just had to remember that the details all somehow acted as pointers to the person of Jesus Christ, who was being miraculously pre-figured by Moses centuries before the fact.

But I had not read the Bible, the Source, the Wellspring of my Faith, in around ten years.  I laid great hope in our home Bible studies, but I felt famished after being coerced into watching Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose videos during Bible study time.  I felt the Holy Ghost convicting me to again ‘dig into the Word’, which us Fundamentalists used as code for reading the Bible.  I picked up my New King James Bible.  I started in Genesis.  “In the beginning….”

My attitude in reading was different than it was ten years previously.  I no longer read it with the same attitude that I did in Calvary Chapel.  By this time, I had been conditioned with several years of reading textbooks and scientific papers.  I knew how to study.  I did not read the Bible in the bathtub or in bed, as I had before.  I instead sat at the table, with pen and pad in hand, and after a short prayer for guidance, I did my best to actually study the text as I would study any other text worthy of intense scrutiny.  This time when I read the Bible, I took copious notes.  I highlighted.  I crosschecked one passage to see how it compared with another.  I paid attention to details.  I tried to detach myself emotionally from my revered text, and tried to understand what cultural context could produce a Deity that suddenly seemed alien to everything I had been led to believe in Calvary Chapel.

I made it up to 1 Samuel.  I could not go any further.  The Bible felt like a different book when I read it critically as opposed to devotionally.  When I crosschecked the text, many things seemed out of place.  I noticed stories that repeated, sometimes with a couple of details or names changed, but nevertheless repeated.  I noticed characters doing things that seemed to have no motivation, non-sequiturs, or events that would be repeated.  I tried keeping track of how many times Moses climbed Mount Sinai to retrieve his laws, and it became so confusing that in the end I could never fully sort it out.  Abram, Abraham and Jacob all had stories of visiting a foreign king, and telling that king that their beautiful wives were actually their sisters.  Moses curses the land of Egypt with plagues that kill all the livestock, but the livestock is suddenly present again just in time for the next curse that kills them again.  Isaac appears out of nowhere 20 years after he was shown on his deathbed, blind, and tricked into giving his birthright to the wrong son.  The exiled Moses repeats the same itinerary as the exiled Jacob.  King Saul hunts for his young protégé David then forgives him after David spared his life.  Then with no explanation, Saul is shown hunting for him again.  Jacob scolds his son Joseph, and claims that he and his mother will not bow to him, years after Joseph’s mother had already died in labor.  Samuel pronounces Saul king at least twice, the first by anointing him with oil in a private ceremony, then again by drawing lots amongst all the tribes of Israel.  After David killed Goliath, King Saul needs to be introduced to the valiant young warrior as if he did not know him, even though King Saul had earlier specifically requested the services of David, by name, for his harp playing skills. 

Saul loved David so much that he became his armor bearer, and then he suddenly forgot about him after he killed Goliath?  What is going on?  Early in the book of 1Samuel it is said that God prevented the Philistines from attacking Israel while Samuel, his prophet, was alive.  But the rest of 1Samuel is a record of nothing but Philistine invasions.  What happened? 

Deuteronomy claims to be a record of the repeating of the Mosaic laws to the new generation of Hebrews before they possess their Promised Land.  Yet when I compared the Deuteronomy laws with the laws of Exodus and Leviticus, they were almost never the same, and in some cases flatly contradicted.  Events in Deuteronomy are described as occurring in different locations, and for different reasons than they do in the other Mosaic books, especially Numbers.  Deuteronomy claims that Moses was given two sets of the Ten Commandments, and that the second was like the first.  But a simple comparison of the two sets of the Ten Commandments as given in Exodus shows that they were almost entirely different.  The firstborn of people and livestock are treated differently in different portions of Scripture.  There seemed to me to be some confusion about what to do with firstborn male children.  In some texts, they are to be ‘redeemed’ to God, along with the firstborn of all the livestock.  But in other texts, humans do not have to dedicate their first born, but can redeem them for money.  Still other texts specify that firstborns do not have to be redeemed at all, but that the job goes to Levites.  Specific priestly rules often differed, even just slightly.  Priests may eat different parts of livestock dedicated for sacrifice, but those body parts differ depending on which text is referenced.

These were all things I noticed and which I am referencing from the notes I took at the time.  But none of these strange signs of textual tampering, the duplication and alternate versions of stories, the changing and abnegation of laws, or other anomalies caused me to doubt the veracity of the Bible.  It was still the Word of God.  After reading it a bit more critically than I had in my Fundamentalist past, I just seemed a lot more unsure in its foundations than I had once believed.  The Bible was not as clear in its interpretation as Calvary Chapel made me think it was.  It would take much more study to plumb its depths than I had earlier imagined. 

For the first time in my life, I noticed the morally embarrassing character of the Deity in the first books of the Bible.  Today, I would call the Deity’s character monstrous, abominable, loathsome and unworthy of any human respect, much less worship.  But at the time I was reading these passages, at a time when I was doing my best to be a good Christian, I was just embarrassed.  I did not know what to think when I read these passages as they were written and without trying to explain it away at any cost.  I once justified the reprehensible character of the Deity as a product of the ancient cultural context in which He was depicted.  I once told myself that the slavery that the Deity regulated in the Bible was actually better treatment than the barbaric and godless slavery as practiced in neighboring cultures.  When God commanded Moses to dispossess the land he was conquering, and when he commanded Moses to kill all Amorites, I reasoned it was because the Amorites had long before earned their destruction by rejecting the True God, by turning instead to false idols and sacrificing their little Amorite babies to those idols.  Everybody in Calvary Chapel reads the Bible in this way.  When church pastors encourage believers to read the Bible, believers have no choice but to excuse all of their Deity’s abhorrent behavior and instruction by any means possible.  But instead of making excuses by inserting things in the Bible that were not already there, I just read the Bible as it was printed, and wrote down troublesome passages in my notes.

I think what bothered me most of all, more than the contradictions, multiple versions of the same stories, more than the questionable morals of the Deity, was the sometimes childish, petulant, dare I say, even immature character of the Deity.  He would throw crippling plagues on Egypt, and then consciously and willfully harden the Pharaoh to unrepentance, which would justify more crippling plagues.  His temper sometimes resembled the tantrums of a spoiled all-powerful toddler, cursing or killing anybody who broke the slightest of His commandments.  I tried to imagine the horror of fire falling from the skies and the earth opening to swallow 250 rebellious Levite priests.  I tried to picture the scene in which Moses ordered the Levite priests to massacre 3000 of their rebellious Hebrews brothers.  When the Hebrews complained about the lack of meat in their diets, the Deity responded by dumping a plague of quail on the camp of ‘day’s journey’ wide on each side and two cubits high.  The Deity seemed proud of stuffing the Hebrews with quail because they dared complain of their lack of meat.  It all reminded me of an impatient father who stuffed his rebellious teenager’s mouth full of cigarettes because he dared sneak a puff.  The Deity commands his followers to stone with stones anybody they suspect of tempting others to stray from the Faith.  Even if that person be a brother or a wife, they are to be stoned.  I tried to imagine the punishment of stoning – hurling rocks at a victim and the fatal infliction of one injury upon the next by the pounding impact of rocks.  Such a torturously painful execution for any reason seemed like nothing short of barbarism.  Could we even do a quick decapitation or something?

Blessings are promised on the Hebrews if they obey the Deity, but they almost seem an afterthought compared to the numerous curses promised on the disobedient.  The amount of curses threatened by the constantly angered Deity in Deuteronomy 28 bordered on the absurd and laughable.  It just seemed over the top.  Sometimes no reason at all was given for the unbelievable temper and wrath of this Deity who was supposedly the center of my Christian beliefs. 

This type of behavior and moral structure was not the rare anomalies of a few isolated passages.  The first few books of the Bible was not a record of a loving and generous Deity occasionally interrupted with descriptions of his punishment of unfaithful followers.  The pages seemed soaked with barbarism and petty behavior from the Deity from beginning to end, and I simply could not ignore it any more.  I never made it past 1Samuel on that reading of my New King James translation of the Bible.  I stopped reading the Bible after I read of the Prophet Samuel’s rejection of Saul as King.  The only rationale given for this rejection was that King Saul disobeyed the Deity.  How did King Saul disobey the Deity and earn His disfavor?  By warring with the Amalekites and sparing the life of the best livestock and Agag, the Amalekite king.  The disobedience came, not in the war, but in the sparing of life.  King Saul was under orders from the Deity to slaughter every living thing among the Amalekites - man, woman, child and animal.  The order from God was explicit.  King Saul was to destroy everybody and everything, and spare nobody, not a single man, woman, infant, sheep, camel or donkey.  Saul did kill everything; he did obey orders, with the sole exception of the Amalekite king, whom he kept imprisoned, and some choice livestock which he intended for sacrifice.  But this was not enough for the Deity.  Saul was to slaughter everything, and for not precisely and savagely following the letter of this command, Saul was cursed from that day onward.  By the time Samuel, the Prophet of God, took a sword and personally killed the imprisoned Amalekite king by hacking him to pieces, I had had enough.  I simply could read no further.  How in the world had I missed all this sludge when I had previously read the Bible?  How could I have simply prayed, read about morally reprehensible behavior from the God that I worshipped, then closed the Bible and thanked God for the precious jewel of His Word?  How could I have done that?  How?

The problems ran even deeper than this.  I had been promised by Pastors Skip and Chuck of Calvary Chapel, that every detail of the Scriptures was there by the design of the Holy Ghost.  The details of the Old Testament, I was told, pointed to or prefigured the person of Jesus Christ in the New Covenant.  Calvary Chapel prided itself on devotional reading from the entire Bible, both New and Old Testaments.  But on this reading, I could no longer read these ancient Scriptures with a sense of devotion, or of applying some kind of relevance to my own life.  What did any of this ancient history, these meandering stories of patriarchs, judges, kings and lawgivers, these minutias of alien purity laws and tabernacle regulations, these detailed accounts of Divinely commanded genocide - what did any of this have to do with my Christian life?  I felt separated from these Scriptures by the continents of distance and the millennia of time that stood between us.  The problem was that I was trying to put my faith in the Christian religion as a follower of my Savior Jesus.  I did not want to worship the Bible as an idol, as I once did.  I acknowledged that it had its share of legend and myth, and I was still willing to place my Faith in it as a source of my Christian beliefs.  But Rosemary and I were getting married very soon.  I wanted nothing more than to be a good husband for my future wife.  I wanted a basis for my morality, and I believed that the only way to gain that moral basis was through my faith in Jesus Christ as expressed by my religion.  In this case, my religion was Christianity.  So I turned to the Bible to learn about Jesus, to follow the example set by my Savior, and to be a good Christian.  To a good husband.  To be a good person.  That is all I wanted.  But in the process, I was forced to read the divinely inspired Source of my Faith, and I discovered that it was saturated with embarrassing, irrelevant crap that I did not know what to do with.  What did any of these culturally alien texts have to do with my Christian walk and my desire to be a good husband?  Sure, I could pull a life lesson for my marriage from analogous readings of portions of Scripture, for instance from the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca.  But I figured a Divine oracle, inspired by the all-wise creator of my soul could be more explicit.  I could pull life lessons from analogous readings of any man made product of literature.  Aesop’s Fables contained more explicit lessons for my life than my attempts to dredge some kind of personal meaning from the stories I was reading in the Bible.

I still did not lack Faith in my Christian faith.  This shocking reading of the Bible did not destroy my Faith.  I just no longer knew what to do with the Bible any more.  At the time, I found it more of an embarrassment than as truly morally wrong.  I was confused.  I did not know what to think.

I was initially excited when Rosemary asked me to lead her through private study of the Bible.  But after my own reading, this excitement did not last long.  I knew what the Bible contained.  I knew there were good things to be found, but I suddenly felt like I had to wade through a sewer to get to them.  I was embarrassed.  So I ended up doing the same thing that her Catholic Church had done for her.  I intentionally steered her away from the embarrassment.  I stuck with pre-selected readings, just like her Catholic priests.  We stuck with the safe and neutered territory of the Gospels.  We read well-worn portions of Paul’s Epistles.  The first 3/4 of her big, fat, thick Bible was ignored for the comfortable, familiar and tepid readings in the last 1/4.  I filtered her Bible.  I was as guilty as her Catholic church in pre-selecting readings and trying to keep everything sterile and sanitized.  I was afraid of embarrassing myself by letting her read the bulk of what I knew the Bible contained.  I knew there was a problem, but I did not yet know what to do about it except pray, and ask for guidance.


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