Facing irrational fears

This article came to me yesterday while hiking alone in the Owens Peak Wilderness.

I have always had an irrational fear of heights.  My friends know of my enthusiasm for hiking in the mountains, and they are always surprised when they discover just how nervous I sometimes get when I am out on the trails.  My fear does not come from some dangerous risk that I should not be taking.  My fear does not come from a rational fear of falling.  I am usually in no danger when the knot of fear grips my stomach.  If I am hiking along a mountain ledge or canyon rim, I make sure that I am far enough from the ledge to be out of danger.  There is no reason to be afraid when I watch my step and keep a safe distance.  But the fear sometimes becomes overwhelming, and there have been times when it became so bad that I would sit, squeeze my eyes closed and refuse to take another step.  I am perched on a ledge that is hundreds or even thousands of feet above the surrounding area.  The vista is spectacular, and the swirling clouds are so close that I feel I can almost reach out and touch them.  But even though I keep a safe distance from danger, my brain dwells the fact that I have it within my own power, if I wished, to walk to the edge of the precipice, dive off, and spiral down to the rocky sawteeth below.  I am not afraid of the real danger, I am afraid of the vision of perceived helplessness that I replay in my head.  

I once heard worry defined as imagining the worst possible outcome of some scenario, then obsessing over that worst possible thing happening.  In my case, the worst possible scenario is actively walking to the ledge and jumping.  When I am the upper floor of a hotel, or even looking over a high balcony, the thought enters my head of opening the window, climbing over the railing, and taking a nosedive.  I once walked a few hundred yards over the Golden Gate Bridge but I had to turn back after looking at the water far below.  I obsessed over the thought of cutting through all the suicide barriers and hurtling into the bay.  I am not suicidal.  I have no desire to jump.  There is no rational reason that I would ever purposefully and intentionally overcome all safety barriers placed there for my protection, and jump.  Yet, my stomach knots up with fear.  I am not afraid of a real danger of falling.  I am afraid of an irrational and imagined vision that I place in my head.

I have had this fear since I was a young boy, but over the years it has gotten better.  Constant travel for work has eased my fear of flying.  Air turbulence that used to paralyze me with fear now rarely bothers me.  My refusal to quit hiking in the mountains has also helped.  The fact that I know my fears are irrational allows me to confront the fear before it overwhelms me. 

When I am up in the mountains, I can sometimes see the trail far out in front of me.  While the trail is wide enough that I should feel no danger, all I see ahead of me is a thin hairline sliver that is barley etched into the face of the sheer rock wall, and dangling far over the valley below.  My stomach seizes and my brain wants my feet to stop.  In the perspective of the whole mountain, I am such a tiny speck that I imagine a sudden whirlwind launching me over the edge.  The mountain looks like it could shrug its shoulders and throw me off like a dog shaking off a flea.  But I know such fears are irrational, and there is nothing to fear.  My enjoyment of the hike and the freedom of the wilderness must overcome all irrationality.  I put the image of falling out of my head, sometimes by scolding myself, sometimes by just humming a melody, and I am eventually able to overcome my fears.  I have learned not to let irrationality and fear destroy what I love in life.

Conversions and De-conversions – Religious Experience and Unbelief

It is always a joy when a new baby is born within our circle of family and friends.  It is a joy, but Rosemary and I are also briefly saddened by the fact that these new parents are experiencing a joy that we will, in all likelihood, never experience.  Just last week, Rosemary’s closest friend from the Philippines gave birth to her third baby boy.  As we celebrated the birth with the new parents in the maternity ward, the pious mother continually peppered her conversation with gratitude to the beneficent deity that she believed had blessed her.  Like most women from Philippines, her devotion to the Catholic Church is a strong part of her identity.  She is one of the very few people who was our friend when I was a Christian, and remained a friend after I lost my Faith.  Rosemary and I did not blame her for thanking the god she had faith in for the blessing of three children. 

I do not believe that her children are the result of a special blessing from a deity who pours favor on her.  I also no not believe that Rosemary’s miscarriages are due to special curses from a deity who pours scorn on us.  Both of these attributions are equally groundless and superstitious nonsense.  And I am certain that our friend, in thanking her god for her blessings, was not intending to imply that her god was cursing us.  We were there to celebrate, and such selfish and overly sensitive implications never entered our minds.  But I do know that one of the things that religions do so well is provide an outlet for the expression of overwhelming emotion.  During one of those rare times of pure joy and beauty in life, during one of those brief occasions when fleeting ecstasy lingers long enough to savor, people often feel the need to express themselves with an overwhelming sense of gratitude.  They feel the need to thank somebody, even if the source of good fortune is not readily apparent.  It is a shame that the actual people who were involved are often forgotten, but a supremely beneficent deity is always there; ready to accept any and all credit and gratitude.  I profess that it is irrational superstition.  But we human beings are inherently irrational animals.  Critical thought is a skill that does not come naturally; rather it must be learned, developed and actively practiced to be of any value.  Even people who apply a developed skill of critical thought do not use it in a consistent or constant manner.  Humans are irrational and emotional thinkers, because we are humans.  This is just part of who we are.  I do not blame my friend one bit for the gratitude she expressed to her deity.  She is a new mother in the maternity ward, and we were there with her to celebrate mere hours after she gave birth.  I accept her in her belief because she accepts me in my non-belief. 

This celebration with a new mother happened in a hospital room only one week ago.  This long story of my Conversions and De-conversions into and out of several types of religious beliefs is finished.  When I began writing this long series, I knew that the story of my leaving Faith is essentially the story of my life.  Christianity left such a profound imprint on my life as a believer, that I may never be able to completely remove the detritus of religious faith from my personality.  Even as a non-believer, religious belief and expression is something that I have experienced, and those experiences will likely stay with me the rest of my life.  I confess that I am left with no choice but to be respectful of the religious experience of the believer.  Our inherent irrationality implies our inherent religiosity. 

I must be respectful of the religious experience.  But I despise bogus Christian apologetics.  I hate the misrepresentation of science among many religious believers.  I am a physicist, so when I hear Christians that I know repeat some bit of pseudo-science that they read from some Christian propaganda pamphlet, I will do my best to gently and respectfully correct them.  When a workmate tells me that I must believe in a Case for a Creator because of some Lee Strobel video that they saw, I will watch it, and I will point out to that workmate every disgusting lie and scientific misrepresentation in that video. 

I will defend science and attempt to educate the value of critical thinking.  But I never argue against the religious experiences or beliefs of others.  I was never argued out of religious belief.  As this long Conversions and De-Conversions series demonstrates, my rejection of religious faith was due to a long, long process of understanding basic critical thinking skills, then gaining the courage to apply those skills to the underlying assumptions behind my own core religious beliefs.  Nobody could tell me to leave religion.  I had to leave on my own, with my own thoughts and my own rationale.  When my Faith finally began to dissolve in 2007, it corresponded to a publishing phenomenon subsequently called New Atheism.  It was about this time that major best sellers appeared from Dawkins, Harris, et al., which attempted to argue believers out of their religion.  As I was leaving Christianity, I went through a reading frenzy to personally investigate my religious beliefs, but I intentionally avoided anything by these New Atheists who wanted to argue for my rational soul.  I have nothing against any of these authors.  In fact, I have read two of Dawkins’ more scientific books, and loved them.  But upon leaving Christianity, I needed to explore my beliefs on my own terms.  If I was going to leave Christianity, I did not want to get swept up in yet another movement, even a movement of self-purported rationality and evidence-based reasoning.  I still have no desire to follow a movement based on organized non-belief.

In the very first entry in this long Conversions and De-conversions series, I expressed disappointment that so many of the de-conversions stories that I have read seem to follow the same pattern.  The person will describe what a devout believer they were in some detail, then describe what led them out of religion in even greater detail.  At the moment they stopped believing, their story ends with little development on how their non-belief further affected their lives after belief.  Over 18 months after I wrote that first entry, I see that I have unavoidably followed the same lamentable pattern.  I have written over 35 chapters that describe a lifetime of religious escapades, only to end it around the year 2009 with my final realization that there is certainly no god looking out for us.  I end my story there, with only a short anecdote from last week tacked on the end.  I realize now that that there is no spiritual journey to describe without Faith, so there is nothing really left to this story.  I will not describe how much happier or fuller my life is without religion.  I will not explain how my eyes have been opened, and I can now see the physical world as it is with the gift of Rationality.  This may be true of others who have left the Faith, but for me, as mundane as it may sound, life simply continues pretty much as it always has.  There was no epiphany.  There was no moment of rationality where I joyously threw off the shackles of religion and proclaimed that there was no god.  My journey out of religious belief lasted for decades, and although my thoughts and opinions have changed drastically since I left Faith, at the core I think I am still the same person I ever was.  I had a wonderful marriage as a Christian and again as an apostate.  I did things I was proud of before and after belief.  I said stupid things to people and hurt many feelings before and after belief.  I have been courageous, bold, cowardly, obnoxious, loving, resentful, silly, serious, selfish, generous – in fact, I continue to experience the vast range of human emotion whether I have Faith or not.  Nothing much has changed.  But I have always maintained that I stuck with religious belief because I desperately wanted to be happy, content, and be the best person that I could be.  I finally left religion for exactly the same reasons.  Personal honesty compelled it.  My atheism, if I must call it that, was not a conscious decision that I decided to follow.  It is simply the logical road to follow if I was to maintain any personal integrity. 

If anything has changed, it is only this:  the overwhelming, suffocating guilt that religious belief smothered me with is finally gone.  All through my years as a Christian believer, I was convinced that the death of Jesus represented the virtuous action of a righteous Judge who still loved His children enough to die for them.  It was only long after I had left religious belief, and had removed myself enough from the beliefs to gain some outside perspective, that I could see how barbarous that particular ‘virtue’ really is.  There is nothing that can make human sacrifice to be a virtue, and there is no justice in placing sins on the back of a human scapegoat.  In fact, it was only after I had gained significant distance from the Christian religion that I discovered what a truly horrific monster this god, this Jehovah, and by extension, this Jesus, really was.  I missed my Christian beliefs in the first few years after I lost my Faith.  But only after I read the Bible and objectively studied the doctrines of the Christian religion without actually believing in them, did I discover that these were all products of more barbarous times, and that sacrifice to appease a wrathful deity made no sense anymore.  I missed my Christian faith for a while, but today I am glad to discover that the universe is not run by a monster who has hoodwinked His creation into thinking that His atrocities are the result of His moral perfection.  This deity is no better than the Butcher of Baghdad, and His worshippers are dazzled by His cult of personality.  Now that I am a non-believer, I am glad to be rid of Him.

These days, I rarely ever think of the god I once believed in, His holy books or doctrines of belief.  Rosemary and I have made new friends who accept us for who we are, and we have filled our lives with interests and activities that fulfill us.  Life goes on without Him, with the same joys and sorrows, tragedies and triumphs that I have always felt.  Although the label fits, I rarely, if ever, call myself an atheist.  I am not offended by the term; in fact this is how many people I know will describe my beliefs.  That is fine by me, but I find that the term atheist is just not useful in describing anything.  If I am asked to label myself in a religious context, I prefer non-believer or even apostate.  But in the end, I do not really care and I try not to get too hung up on how a person wishes to describe me.  What is more important to me is that people understand why I no longer believe.  This why question is the greatest hurdle for believers to come to grips with.  Many of our religious friends know that I do not share their beliefs.  Not a single one of them, not one, has ever asked me why.  Most Christians who knew me when my Faith collapsed felt free to condemn, but not a single one of them asked me why.  How I wish just one of them would have asked me why I lost my Faith, instead of making assumptions about my secret desire to sin and avoiding ultimate accountability to a deity.  Why is not typically in the religious person’s vocabulary.  Belief is a virtue, methodology is a hinderance.  Just two weekends ago a missionary for the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door.  I usually tell them I am not interested, but on this morning I patiently listened as she flipped through her Watchtower magazine and told me that God has great things planned for my life.

“I do not believe that.”

“You don’t?  That is so sad.”

“Why should I believe it?  Tell me.  Why?”

She and her assistant replied with stone cold silence.  I wished them a good day.  I was once condemned by a Catholic friend, who has long since abandoned us, of demanding proof for the existence of her god, as if asking for proof were a bad thing.

“You want proof!  How dare you demand proof from God!”

“I do not demand proof.  I would simply like some evidence.”

“Evidence?  Look around you!  Look at the world you live in!  What more evidence do you need?”

The Christians that I know do not know how to deal with the question why.  Unfortunately, in pondering questions about the nature of reality, I believe that methodology is far more important than answers.

I do not know what the future may hold.  Perhaps some day I will be shown to be wrong about my non-belief.  In fact, I welcome that day to come.  One thing that I have learned after leaving religious belief is to not be offended when I am shown to be wrong – wrong about anything.  When that day comes, I will write another entry in this series.  But as of today, 15 July 2013, I do not see any reason to believe in supernatural deities, spirits, demons, angels or any other creatures of supra-normal reality.  If I have no reason to believe, I do not believe.  Do these creatures actually exist?  Does God, Jehovah, Jesus, whatever one wishes to call this Deity, really exist?  I highly doubt it, but even if He did, I have no idea what, if anything, this Deity could possibly want from me.  So I do not worry about it.  Non-belief is effortless.  I do not struggle to have enough Faith to be an Atheist.  When I was a Christian, I constantly prayed to God to ease my doubts, to strengthen my Faith, and maintain my desire to believe.  It was often an uphill battle, and if the vast number of sermons I have heard on the topic is any indication, I believe this struggle to believe is true of most Christians.  But non-belief is truly effortless.  I do not believe in Jehovah, Jesus or any other invisible deity for the exact, same, identical reason that I do not believe in ghosts, mermaids, Sasquatch, or Aswang,  I do not believe in the power of prayer, for the exact, same, identical reason that I do not believe in the power of Reiki, Horoscopes, Palmistry or Spirit Channeling.   

Of course I do not know everything.  There may be a creature out there who possesses the qualities that we humans would typically ascribe to a deity.  This material universe may be a mere shadowy projection of a vaster supernatural reality.  Maybe.  These things may be fun to speculate on, but I still confidently assert that there is no such thing as a supernatural god.  Believers sometimes complain that I am not justified in my positive assertion that there is no god.  But I look at the intersection between belief and knowledge in much the same way that I positively assert that I will drive to work safely tomorrow morning.  I know that I will arrive safely to work tomorrow morning and I know that I will drive through all the congested morning traffic without incident.  And while I know this to be true, I do not hesitate for a moment to contemplate the real and significant possibility that I could be injured or killed while driving to work.  For all practical purposes, I believe and I know that I will drive without incident to work tomorrow morning, even while acknowledging that there is always a risk involved.  This is exactly how I negotiate my life without a god.  For all practical purposes, I believe and I know that there is no god to worry about – but if there is significant risk to be had, somebody had better demonstrate it before I will believe it.  It is really no more complicated than that.

That is where I am today, 15 July 2013.  I have no desire to indulge myself in my former beliefs.  But at the same time, I am surrounded by people who continue to hold to these same beliefs.  These are people I love, including my wife, who have no desire or reason to abandon their beliefs.  I have to remember how these believers still experience their religious beliefs, and what these beliefs mean to them.  Like it or not, I am still the product of a Christian culture and heritage.  I understand that religion has done much harm in the world, but I have to remember but that for the vast bulk of Christians that I know it has given them a profound sense of identity, culture, community, morality and yes, purpose.  I am convinced that the vast majority of people who continue with their religious Faith, do so because they are trying to be good, decent, moral people.  True, I think that all these benefits can be gained without religion, but try telling that to the religious believer.  That would be as effective as telling me to stop eating tamales and menudo because I can gain all the calories I need without eating unhealthy Mexican food.  Forget it!  That is just never going to happen.  We all live with irrationality and emotion in some part of our lives.

I have one more short story to tell before I end this long Conversions and De-conversions series.  Let me go back to last week, celebrating with our friends in the maternity ward.  I must follow that story of birth with a story of death.  Thanks to Rosemary’s Facebook connections, we had two bits of news that morning that we had to deal with.  The first was the birth of a child, and we went to the maternity ward to celebrate.  The second was news that a friend from my old Baptist Church had a heart attack and was in a different floor of the same hospital.  Rosemary and I had to put awkwardness aside and visit.  So we left the maternity ward, then took the elevator to Intensive Care, where we met Pastor Alvarez of La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church with his dying wife.  I had not seen either one since I stopped attending that church, but word had long ago reached them that I had apostatized from the Faith.  But deep down, I loved this man who had officiated at our wedding, and I needed to put our pasts behind and offer what support I could in his time of need.  I looked at his wife D----.  She had just retired from her career as a school teacher only a few weeks before.  Then, for no apparent reason or purpose, she had a severe heart attack.  When Rosemary and I visited, she was under an induced coma and her body temperature was somehow being lowered to relieve the pressure on her swelling brain.  She was ghostly white, and when I held her hand it was icy cold.  Pastor Alvarez had been awake all night, and had been through hell. 

Slow, quiet, exhausted, the first words he said to me were, “Joe, I have not seen you in a long time.”  I ignored it.  I just hugged him.

We learned that there would be a prayer vigil later that day in the hospital courtyard.  Rosemary insisted that we should attend, and I agreed to go.  I was not looking forward to meeting so many people who knew me as an apostate and unbeliever, but I had to put awkwardness aside for the sake of friendship and support.

That afternoon, about thirty believers from La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church met in the hospital courtyard.   I did recognize most, but I did my best to keep as low a profile as possible.  I did not want to be the white elephant in the room.  They were not there for me, and I did not want to interrupt.  At the same time I did not want to participate in their vigil.  Christians claim that that there is nothing much worse than somebody who hypocritically pretends to believe.  I never indulge them.

Everybody stood in a large circle and shared stories and laughs about the woman who was dying just three floors above them.  One of her adopted children was there, and even though he had long since left the house as an adult, he expressed his love and gratitude for the family who had adopted him as a child.  Rosemary shared that D---- was one of the first friends she made when she came to live in the United States.

Eventually the stories ended, and the inevitable appeal to their deity began.  Everybody stood in a circle and held hands while I listened from one of the courtyard benches.  A few comforting Scriptures were read, mostly from the Psalms.  Then one by one, those who felt led took their turn in prayer.  The prayers were identical to those that I had heard countless times in my years as a believer. 

“Lord, we remember all the wonderful things that D---- means to us…”

“Lord, You are the great physician…”

“Lord, we just come before Your throne of grace and we ask You to touch D---- and heal her of her affliction…”

“Lord, we selfishly ask that You guide the hands of the surgeons and physicians that You placed over her care….”

Every one of these people loved D----, and asked their almighty benefactor for a full recovery.  Even Rosemary gave her own tearful prayer in her native Tagalog language.  As faithful and believing as each of these people were, each prayer contained the psychologically conditioned admission of defeat, “…but not my will but Yours be done…”  These believers do not know it, but such pleas for the Deity to perform His own will is just a way of bracing themselves for the inevitable unanswered prayer and subsequent death of the woman they are all praying for.  Asking the Almighty to do something so trivial as to only perform His will is a diversion from accepting the fact that the Almighty is thoroughly incompetent and powerless, if He even exists at all.

D---- lasted two more days in a coma before she died.  I was secretly relieved that she died.  I was afraid that if she did recover from her swollen brain, she would suffer from brain damage for the rest of her life.  I wept with Pastor Alvarez after the death of his wife, but I also pitied him.  He was the one who would have to believe that the Almighty took her life for some unseen purpose and higher plan.  I do not believe in such superstitions.  Like the loss of our children through miscarriages, sometimes things just happen. 

But despite all the superstition and irrationality that I find in religion, I have to remember why these people continue to believe.  We faced polar extremes of emotion that day in the hospital, from the birth of a child to the death of a friend.  And just like with the birth of a child, one of the things that religions do so well is provide an outlet for the expression of overwhelming emotion.  During those all too frequent times of loss and suffering in life, during one of those occasions of prolonged grief, people often feel the need to express themselves with an overwhelming sense of sorrow and regret.  They feel the need to appeal to somebody for help because they know that they are actually powerless to do anything.  It is a shame that the actual people who were involved are often forgotten, but a supremely beneficent deity is there; ready to accept any and all appeals for help that can be made available.  I profess that it is irrational superstition.  But we human beings are inherently irrational animals. 

Humans are irrational and emotional, because we are humans.  This is just part of who we are.  I do not blame my friends one bit for appealing to a deity during a time of sadness.  The real purpose of our visit in the prayer vigil was to remember D---- for the short time left that she would be alive, to share stories about her life and our experiences with her, and to offer each other support during our time of grief.  I accept them in their belief even if they do not accept me in my non-belief.  I accept them because I have been where they are in belief.  I completely understand them.  And I never want to forget. 

THE END

Previous Chapter

Conversions and De-Conversions - Powerless

I knew of only a single way to be a good person.  As I have stressed several times in the last few chapters of this series, I returned to my religious beliefs out of my desire to be the best husband that I could be.  I had believed at that time, that there was only one path to living a morally virtuous life, and that was through the divine empowerment of the Holy Spirit.  The particular set of religious beliefs and spiritual gifts that the Holy Spirit chose to manifest Himself through was probably irrelevant, I figured, at least it was not for me to say.  I had come to think that God probably revealed Himself through any number of human contrivances that we chose to call religions.  I had become liberal enough in my beliefs not to any longer think that the exclusive path to Salvation was found in any single religion.  But I still had enough residual fundamentalist dogma that remained lodged in my brain, that I still believed adherence to one of those religions was necessary for moral behavior.  Christianity taught me that without God, I was naturally a wicked, deceitful, corrupt and sinful creature.  Any good that I did was not of myself, but was to be credited solely to God working through me.  That belief, which I now consider to be superstitious and poisonous, survived years of university physics education, and years of exposure to various cultures that were different from my own.  It survived my increasing liberality.  It even survived my proper understanding and application of rational and critical thought.  There were still some things in my life that I was not willing to hold up to scrutiny.  So in my desperate desire to be good, I had to believe that I was evil.

I don’t know what the motivations were for my new friends in our home Bible Study group.  They were all fervent believers in various stages of personal spiritual maturity.  Rick Warren constantly told us, in his 40 Days of Purpose video series, that as believers our main purpose in life was to serve others for the greater glory of God.  One way to serve, he told us, was to organize our small Bible Study group to minister at a homeless shelter, a retirement home, or even a soup kitchen.  We needed to serve those people who happened to be less fortunate than ourselves, and serve them in the name of Jesus Christ, if we were to understand true purpose and fulfillment.  Christianity was the path to be a good husband for my new wife.  Jesus showed us the way, and Rick Warren simplified the message for us.  We would serve others.

In our mission to serve others, I mostly enjoyed going to the retirement home.  I was very frustrated that none of my other Christian brothers and sisters ever showed up to minister to the elderly with Rosemary and me.  We spent quite a bit of time at our Bible Study making arrangements over where to go, and where we would like to minister, followed by a prayer circle, where we all held hands and asked for divine empowerment and blessing.  With this in mind, it was always discouraging for Rosemary and me to arrive at the retirement home, with plenty of gifts to dispense among the elderly, to be continually disappointed by my fellow believers.  They never showed up to help us.  We tried to be understanding.  We knew that they all had their own separate lives and busy schedules and obligations.  But it was still discouraging to spend all that time planning, making arrangements, praying for strength and guidance, only to be disappointed time and again by their absence.  What were they praying for if they were not going to participate?  Why did they squander the divine numinous power that they constantly prayed for?  I enjoyed visiting the retirement home, but I told Rosemary that I was tired of us carrying the burden ourselves.  I finally told our group that we needed to find a way of serving that everybody would be willing to support.

So our small group decided to solicit the help of our parent church, La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church.  The poverty stricken, of which there are many in the border regions of Texas, sometimes solicited help from the Church, so we were able to get several locations where help was needed.  We selected an area that we were told was in desperate need of help.  Their meager home needed some basic repairs, which the inhabitants were not able to afford.

In my youth, growing up in San Ysidro, I had seen desperate poverty, especially among the Pueblo Natives.  I knew what it looked like.  When I attended Calvary Chapel, I had made a habit of inviting homeless men into my apartment to sleep on my couch and share what food I could.  Rosemary had certainly seen much poverty during her frequent missions to the miserable and filthy slums of Pasay City.  The Catholic Church in the Philippines was no stranger to dealing with poverty.

Since Rosemary and I had seen such poverty we decided to prepare ourselves for the worst.  We had the address where we were to meet the rest of our team for the day’s work.  Rosemary and I wore our sturdiest work clothes, and prayed together, asking God for His strength for the struggles we would face that day.  I was a little nervous.  After so many years away from Calvary Chapel, I hoped that I could regain what it would take to be a servant for God. 

We found the address on a city map, and immediately found there was something wrong when we drove through a moderately affluent residential area.  “These houses look kind of nice for a poor area”, Rosemary told me.  I agreed.  I was expecting more of a border slum area, of which there are many in this part of Texas.  But instead, the address lead to a large brick home with an antique show car parked in front of the garage.  “This can’t be right”.

But it was.  We waited just in case, and we soon saw some of our friends arrive.  We all met in the front for group prayer, asking again for the strength of the Holy Spirit to be witnesses for Jesus Christ.  Then we knocked on the door.  Ana, an elderly Hispanic lady was waiting for us.  First she led us to her husband José, who was sick in bed with a huge neck brace.  We all gathered his bed, held hands and prayed for José’s health.  After our prayer duties were finished, we followed Ana out to her kitchen, leaving José alone on the bed, as sick as ever.

Ana, through an interpreter, told us what she needed done.  There was some backed up plumbing.  A hole in one of the interior walls.  Some bricks had wedged loose from her back yard wall.  Everybody immediately got to work.

Rosemary and I were simply astounded.  I wandered around the house and looked at some of the projects that we were going to be doing for Ana, who was obviously not as poverty stricken as we were led to believe.  “Rosemary, this house is nicer than ours!  What are we doing here?”  Rosemary looked for something meaningful to do, but found nothing.  Rosemary was used to feeding families who made their homes under bridges in Manila.  She could not bring herself to be a maid for the affluent in the name of Jesus Christ.  I was angered, not so much with Ana and José but at the fact that none of my Spirit empowered brethren were protesting.  Ana and José were plainly wealthy enough to afford the plumbers and carpenters necessary to do this kind of work, but they instead appealed to the Church, and we, in our obsequious weakness, became pusillanimous pushovers in the name of Jesus Christ.  They were taking advantage of our free labor, and we were complying by turning the other cheek.

I walked outside to the back yard, ready to minister to the poorest of the poor, and I laid eyes on one young lady in our Bible Study group trimming roses.  Trimming roses!  That was the limit.  “C’mon Rosemary, let’s get out of here.”

Later that week, we all met again in our house for the next session in Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose video series.  People started making arrangements for a follow-up visit to José and Ana’s house.  One man was available later the next week to hang some sheetrock and plaster.  Somebody else purchased some plumbing supplies and could work on the pipes late after work...

“Those were the richest poor people I have ever seen,” I protested.  “I am not going back there.”

The wife of the group leader answered back, “well true, they we’re not exactly as poor as we expected.  But they did ask, and we are called to be servants and witnesses for the Gospel...”

She could excuse their timorous behavior all she wanted.  None of that mattered to me any more.  I suddenly found that all the virtuous rationale that they gave made no sense to me any more.  Christian or no Christian, these people clearly intended to take full advantage of us as willing Christians.  We were their tools.  They were not in any desperate need.  They just appealed to our church in the hope to get some free labor.  But this was nothing new.  I saw this as familiar behavior for the Christian who is desperate to share their Gospel of Jesus at any cost.  I had known many Christians with backbones and who would not be taken advantage of, but selling out for the Gospel was a behavior pattern that I was all too familiar with.  We were called to serve, but the ultimate goal was to share the Gospel and win souls for Jesus.  No price was too high to achieve that aim.  Jesus told us to turn the other cheek if we were struck, so we did free manual labor for a wealthy woman, all in the hope that she would somehow see our love of Jesus through our actions.  But I was cynical enough to know that she would not suddenly become convicted by our demonstrations of Jesus’ love.  She just wanted suckers to fix her leaky pipes.

This sort of thing had never bothered me before.  But for some reason, this otherwise trivial episode affected me deeply.  I was embarrassed because Rosemary and I had prepared for the worst, and we felt like we were wasting time ministering to those who were not in need.  I was exasperated with my friends because they seemed so weak that they could only follow our group leader’s decision to willingly be taken advantage of.

As long as I got a chance to share the Gospel, I was told, I was doing the will of The Lord.  Ana and José requested the services of the church, the pastors accepted their plea, and who were Rosemary and I to turn it down?  But Rosemary and I had not yet become members of La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church, and we felt no pressure from Church authority.  There was once such a time when I would have agreed that any rationale was justified if the end goal was to spread the Gospel.  I was finished with sharing the Gospel.  I wanted to serve people who were less fortunate than myself, and let the Gospel speak through my actions.  I was not going to be a doormat for Jesus.  

How could my fellow Christians let strangers take complete advantage of them in this weak and cowardly way?  I got a small insight into this question when Rosemary and I were invited by to our group leader’s house for a party.  Rosemary and I hosted the Bible studies in our house, but we were led by an assistant pastor at La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church named Dave Schultz.  I really liked the Schultz family.  Dave was a smart and educated ER physician and his wife Kate was always bright and lively.  Both were extremely devout in their Christian Faith.  Their 18 year old son Henry was a cause for concern.  He was mildly autistic, and would probably never be able to live an independent life.  Henry was also very large, and he worried his family when he would occasionally break into a confused fit.  He could easily overpower his mother Kate, and she sometimes expressed the fear that Henry would hurt her someday.  But they did love him.  Rosemary and I sometimes took Henry out for a day of miniature golf and pizza, and a chance to give Dave and Kate some much needed time to themselves.  He was a difficult but sweet kid.  I miss the Schultz family.

As bright and educated as they were, their house party gave me a small insight into their stifled world.  Every picture on the wall was either of family portraits or framed Bible quotes.  The sheet music on the piano consisted of nothing but hymns.  The only books that I saw on their shelves were Bibles and a few pious novels like CS Lewis’ Narnia series.  The only magazines in the living room were World and Creation, both news magazines published by Fundamentalists for Fundamentalists.  The party was for friends, but everybody I saw was from the church.  Were Dave and Kate’s only friends other Fundamentalist Christians?  Surely Dave would have known many people at the hospital where he worked.  Why were none of them invited?  I asked Dave if anybody from the hospital would be there.  “No, they are non-believers,” he told me frankly.  “I pray for their salvation, and talk with them, but they are so difficult.”  Red flags alarmed immediately.

With so many believers together in one house, and non-believers uninvited and safe from spoiling the piety, the Jesus lingo spewed thick and fluent.  The small talk was saturated with Jesus talk and Christianese.  There was no room for any mundane talk.  One and only one Person dominated the minds of every person there.  “Jesus is so good to me, we love Jesus, Jesus is lovely and worthy to be worshipped, Jesus answered this prayer, Jesus answered that prayer, I talked to Jesus this morning, I am trying to find God’s will for my life…” 

The El Paso sun was intense as usual as we stood out on the back patio.  A small cloud rolled over the sun and momentarily cooled us off.  A young, Spirit filled girl stood from her chair with sudden glorified inspiration, spread out her arms and enthusiastically declared, “Look!  Jesus put a cloud over the sun!  Jesus is giving us shade!  Isn’t Jesus wonderful?!?  I love you Jesus!”  I cringed inside.  This Christian girl struck me as unbelievably immature and childish!  To think that Jesus, the Creator of the Universe, looked upon us puny humans so favorably that He would smile down on us from the Heavens and generously place a cloud over the sun to shade our eyes!  That the All-Mighty would pass trivial favors upon us believers in the midst of countless prayers to relive untold suffering that went unanswered!  The boundaries of eternity were breached for the sake of momentarily cooling off our backyard party!  Never mind the countless victims of endless disasters who were at that very moment suffering in other parts of the world.  Jesus passes goodwill only on His favored!  The myopic arrogance of these Christians!  These Christian friends of mine were so presumptuous of God, and so confident and aware of their own favor in His eyes!  The more I thought about it, the more disgusted I felt.  I am still disgusted by it to this very day. 

Later that evening, Rosemary and I were discussing the party.  The overwhelming piety was too much for my Catholic wife, who still viewed God in a more traditional sense.  “I do not understand this ‘Personal Relationship with Jesus’ talk from these Baptists!  Jesus is my Holy Redeemer.  I do not want Him to be my friend!”  I was disturbed by the behavior of my friends, and even more disturbed that it was behavior that I had once found so normal for us Christians.  We thanked God for the most trivial of things that just happened to occur in our lives, but He never seemed to do anything about our most desperate requests.  He could momentarily place a cloud over the sun to shade our eyes, but He could never remove the autism that crippled young Henry’s brain.  Of all the things we prayed for during our prayer sessions, help on school tests, financial relief, common colds, sore backs, we never once bothered to pray for a healing for poor Henry.  Why was it that we born again Christians never asked this All-Powerful Deity for a healing of Henry’s autism?  We never prayed for something that would require an actual miracle from God.  We only prayed for things that had a chance of occurring without any prayer at all.  This refusal to request the miraculous from Jesus was a tacit admission that I and all my Spirit filled friends really secretly believed Jesus was completely, thoroughly powerless. 

This disturbing realization became most apparent to me when one of Rosemary’s friends got very sick.  Another teacher from Philippines, who had come to the United States with Rosemary, had suddenly developed stomach cancer.

The tumor in Irma’s stomach was discovered too late to save her.  She was very sick, and spent her last days languishing in the hospital room.  She was beyond hope.  All we could do was visit her and keep her company during her remaining time left.  If God could trouble himself to shade the eyes of His favored people on a sunny day, surely He could also remove cancer from a suffering friend.  Irma was not even asking for that much.  All she wanted from God was to get healthy enough to fly back to Philippines so she could die in her own home and with her family.  There were several times when I met with Rosemary’s Catholic friends before visiting Irma in the hospital.  I wanted to ask them all, together, to pray with me to God, the All-Mighty physician, to heal Irma and remove the deadly cancer from her body.  God could do that if we were Faithful.  All things are possible to him that believeth.   Jesus told us so!  We were told to expect miracles!  But I never did ask my Catholic friends to join me in prayer for Irma.  I wanted to shake them out of their stupor!  I wanted to ask them if they really believed the God of the Catholic Faith could perform real miracles.  Did they believe that Irma could be healed or not?

Apparently not.  Irma died in El Paso, painfully and alone, in a foreign land, over 8000 miles from her home.  God could not honor even her most basic request to die in her own home.  I became very angry with God at this point, and I was even angrier at His Faithful.  The death of this woman was senseless.    Like so many things during this troubled time of my life, I was torn between two opposing views of my faith.  Is God who He says He is?  And if He is, then why can’t we petition Him with our most urgent requests, as He says we should?  Worse yet, do we Christians really believe God could perform miracles?  We prayed to Him for everything but the truly miraculous.  It was almost as if we were intentionally setting the bar for His performance very low so we would not be disappointed when we never saw miraculous answers to our prayers. 

I asked Rosemary why we did not pray for a miraculous healing of cancer.  Why did we never expect instant recoveries and considered mere remissions to be miraculous?  Why did it seem that we never prayed for anything that actually took faith?  She replied, “As we say back home, nasa tao ang gawa, nasa Diyos ang awa.  We should not expect God to do everything.  We have to work hard ourselves before we can see God's mercy.”  Perhaps, but again, that leaves God powerless.  It is a tacit admission that the ones doing the actual work is - us.  God is a superfluous fifth wheel.  But if God is truly the All-Mighty, then breaking the bounds of time and space to perform the miraculous would be just as trivial as me lifting my foot to take a step.  If God has infinite power, the power to do absolutely anything then it would be no more difficult for Him to speak the universe into existence with the blast of His nostrils than it would be to soothe the pain in my sore back.  Why could we not expect the miraculous if His unbounded power made performing the miraculous to be trivial?

Why do we ask God to help us with our headaches but do not ask Him to cure autism?  Why do I believe a testimony that He cured a relieved an aching back, but I would never believe a testimony that he regenerated a severed limb, cured a child of cerebral palsy, fused the spinal cord of a quadriplegic.  Why do we pray as if the power of God is no better than a pair of aspirin?  Either God has infinite power, or He has none.  He is All-Mighty or He is Powerless.

It was only after hearing a sermon from Pastor Alvarez of La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church that I finally realized that even if God had all the power the universe could hold, the rules He played by made Him as good as powerless.  Pastor Alvarez’s sermon was one I had heard many times over the years.  Pastor Alvarez was comforting the Christians of his congregation who doubted a God who seemingly left their prayers unanswered.  “God hears your prayers,” he said, “and he answers every single one of them.  You may just not recognize the answer when you get it.  God answers each of your prayers in one of three ways.  God will sometimes say ‘Yes’.  God will sometimes say ‘No’.  And sometimes God will say ‘Wait’.  The answers that He gives to your prayers are always consistent with His most perfect will.”  I finally snapped.  After hearing that same sermon so many times over the previous 40 years, after years of believing that God would answer ‘Yes’ only to those things that were bound to happen by chance or my own effort, I finally figured out why my God was so powerless.  If God was allowed to answer ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Wait’ to every prayer made to Him, the effect was just as if He never heard a single one of those prayers.  There becomes no difference between a God who answers every request made to Him ‘No’ or ‘Wait’, and a God who does not hear or act to any prayer at all.  I could just as well make the same excuse over superstitious prayer to a stone idol and the effect would be the same.  The stone idol does not hear, but we can just convince ourselves that the idol is telling us, in its primal wisdom, to wait before our request is granted.  We are not really ready to receive what we are requesting of the stone idol, so it tells us to wait, because it knows what is better for us.  Nothing happens, and we worship the stone idol for its loving wisdom.  There is no difference between believing the stone idol answers our prayers with ‘No’ or ‘Wait’, and the stone idol having no power at all.  The God I was worshiping might as well be powerless.  If God had any power, he refused to show us.  And if He could not demonstrate His power with the miraculous, then I had no business believing that He would answer even the most trivial of my prayers.  I had been kidding myself for over 40 years.   I had never before understood how God’s own rules made Him a thoroughly impotent and unnecessary creature.  It was deceptive subterfuge to claim that God was answering every prayer, when the act of doing everything was indistinguishable from the act of doing nothing.

I brought this problem up to Christian friend of mine.  “Why do we never see God perform miracles when we ask?  Beneficial miracles, like a healing for poor Irma.  ‘Yes, No or Wait’ does not seem to answer the question “

She replied, “Perhaps the miracles we see today are the sanctified lives we see in believers in Jesus.  Remember what Jesus said, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do”.  What work is greater than what Jesus did on while on Earth?  It must be the Comforter who came to the world in His absence, and it is through the Holy Spirit that Jesus performs the miracle of bringing us closer to His image.  Think of all the lives Jesus has changed!”

There was once a time when this answer would have satisfied me.  No more.  I blurted out the first objection that came to mind.  “But my Dad converted years ago.  He is a Mormon now.  Believe me, he was a monster when I was growing up, but he has become a much better man over the years.  And he is not a Christian!”

She gasped, “A Mormon?  If his life is changed because he became a Mormon, don’t you understand that he is being deceived by Satan?” 

My newly critical mind demanded to find problems with excuses that I was being given.  God always answers ‘Yes, No or Wait’.  Changed lives in the Christian were evidence of His miraculous power, but changed lives in non-Christians were evidence of Satan’s deceptive power.  The game was rigged.  With rules like these, it was impossible for God to ever lose.  It was impossible to know if and when He was doing anything.  It was impossible to falsify any claim made in His name, and therefore it was possible to justify any absurdity.

The spell was slowly breaking.  But I held on to my Faith for dear life.  Dear Jesus, give me the Faith to believe!

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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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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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