Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part nine.

 

I wondered why I kept writing in my journal every day. Was it just a “demented polygraphia”? Polygraphia is a mental disorder in which a person must continually write everything down. I admit I fit the description of this very well. But as for my journal, back in 2005, I answered, “It is an act of faith that somebody will want to reconstruct this framework of thought…” The world is like a comet, “which swings close to God’s sun then vanishes again into deep space. The fact that I bother to think and write at all is my fundamental…faith.

“I benefit now from all the soul-building work of the past. If I look upon the world and see only dirt, I am dead and unhappy. I must continue open to inspiration. I turn in disgust from most organized religion…But I remember the powerful inspiration I felt in a field of wildflowers 37 years ago [now 54 years ago]. I reaffirmed it this spring and will keep it alive, as if there is a God, which there probably is.” I was referring to the Sonoran Desert spring wildflowers.

 

But I also wrote, on 29 March, “It is clear to me that in this world, God is not in control. He has permitted a world of natural law, with cruel consequences, a world in which His love penetrates and contradicts, in which His love is of infinite value, and in which our purpose is to oppose all that is not love, all selfishness, even indifference. It is an artificial, contrived cosmos in which God makes us see how desirable love and beauty are, because of its stark contrast with crustal movements which grind all human life as if it were not there, with chromosomal breakages, and with forces of evolution, which have produce a species both intelligent and evil. To angels, goodness is ordinary. To us, goodness is sacrificial. And even if there is not life beyond, we have been permitted to taste and glimpse what is truly beautiful.”

The next day I wrote, “I stride into the future not knowing if God will even keep me alive, but ready in case he does (and, each second, each day, people live more often than they die).” I wrote this even as my illness returned. But even then, I wrote, because of my love for the creation, I was happier than Donald Trump. Yes, I wrote that in 2005, because even back then Trump was in the news as the perfect example of total furious selfishness.

At the same time, I was reluctant to leave religion which was, I thought, a human adaptation. “Religion is our warm hut of order, agnostic freedom is the cold swirling storm.”

The Holy Spirit: An Experiment

Back when I converted to Christian fundamentalism when I was in high school, I was told in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit was absent from me before I was baptized, and that it would enter into me at the moment of baptism. The details were unclear; would the Holy Spirit merge with my own spirit, or would they remain separate like two battling Zoroastrian entities? (Modern Zoroastrians seem to be the only cultural group that every major religion wants to slaughter.) It was also unclear whether the Holy Spirit would ever leave. But at least if I should stop adhering to fundamentalist beliefs, the Holy Spirit would become inactive.

Therefore my conversion experience, and my subsequent rejection of organized religion, followed the classic ABA experimental design. Situation A, my previous unconverted self; B, my converted self; then back to A, my post-fundamentalist self. My spiritual experiences during B should be significantly different from those during A.

It is true that, during B, I had deeply and soaringly religious experiences. My feeling of inspiration was sometimes so strong that I could hardly breathe. The whole world radiated colorful beauty. The problem is that I also had these experiences before, during the first A. Somewhere around age nine I started feeling unspeakable inspiration when I was surrounded by beautiful natural scenes. Once at a Presbyterian church camp (which clearly did not meet fundamentalist standards) up in the Sierra Nevada we wrote little skits. I was Paul Bunyan going to heaven, and I said that if heaven didn’t have trees I didn’t want to go. The feeling was so strong that I experienced it even when riding my bicycle through endless acres of pesticide-drenched monocultures of orange or olive trees. I can still remember the scent of Malathion. I identified this feeling with God. And I believed the basic Christian doctrines. But I had not yet been baptized.

Many years later, when I left theology behind, I continued to have these experiences. Just this past summer I felt inspiration over and over as I beheld the wonders of nature (see my evolution blog). I am not an atheist like Sir Richard Dawkins, but even he likes to quote someone who described him as “a deeply religious nonbeliever.” If I am indeed still experiencing the Holy Spirit, which really does make me love everybody and the Earth, then why is it still a palpable presence in my post-doctrinal life? Why did I have these feelings before and after my time as a fundamentalist? A statistician would say that my experiences (the dependent variable) during A vs. B (the independent variable) were not significantly different.

I experience the mental state that many (most?) other people experience, and I experience it more often than nearly everyone I know: I feel breathlessly inspired by nature, and I love altruism. (I also hate those times when people defy altruism. Those are the only times I get really, really angry.) But those experiences are not associated with the presence or absence of belief in fundamentalist doctrines.

We’ve been sold a big lie. Fundamentalists insist that everyone who has not joined their ranks is an abject sinner who lives only for pleasure and is constrained from harming other people only by the fear of Hell, and that when you join them you become a new person who is filled with the spirit of love. Both of these assertions are wrong, and are lies. There are perhaps billions of non-fundamentalists who behave in the way the Bible says we can recognize as Christian, except for the doctrines and rituals; and there are at least thousands of Christians in America who are constrained from acting aggressively toward you only because they fear the secular law of the land.

Jesus was wrong about a lot of things but...

As I said in my previous posting, I have great enthusiasm for the insights and example of Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that this man really lived, and really said many of the things attributed to him. I realize this cannot be proved by historical evidence independent of the Bible (yes, like some of you I have read Bart Ehrman and Israel Finkelstein’s books) but here is my reason for believing.

Many of the things that Jesus said and did are in direct contradiction to what many self-identified Christians today believe. They are not things that a group of people could use as a way of controlling or oppressing others. “Consider the lilies of the field, which bloom today but tomorrow dry up in the heat. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” This contradicts many fundamentalist sermons, which say, in effect, Do not bother to look at the lilies of the field, since God wants us to pave them over, and since he is going to burn the world up in a few years anyway. And no one on the Christian Right would tolerate a religious leader who overturned the tables of the moneychangers who made a big profit off of religion, who called religious leaders “whitewashed sepulchres,” who told his disciple Peter to put his sword away, “For those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”

The sayings attributed to Jesus are incredible. How could anyone have just thought them up? Even two thousand years later, we are amazed at them. Certainly the warriors of the Christian Right would never have come up with them. How could a handful of uneducated fishermen have invented them? I am not saying they came into Jesus’ brain out of heaven. But clearly there was a genius named Jesus who actually said these things or something similar to them.

But since Jesus said these things, his followers figured that this was not enough with which to start a church. They were not contented with having people do as Jesus did, just go off in the hills to look at wildflowers and meditate. So they had to create a doctrinal framework in which to place him. All of Christian theology is based on twisted interpretations of the recorded words of Jesus, some of which were invented by his followers.

But even when we consider the words most likely to have been Jesus’ original sayings, we find that he was wrong. He said God would take care of us. The end of the quotation above, about the lilies of the field, is “If God so clothes the grass of the field, will he not take care of you?” His most famous statement is, “Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.” Perhaps all of you have had experiences that show this is not true. As I will explain in a later post, God does not answer prayers. Jesus was wrong about this. Beautifully wrong, wrong with a supreme goodness of mind, but wrong. He wanted so strongly to believe that God had to be better than he was. But it was not true.

When I read the words of Jesus, fully aware of the priestly accretions that have been added to them, I believe them not as literal truth but as an insight into the transcendent goodness of love and beauty of the natural world.