I'm pretty certain that the Bible was the first book I ever knew of, as a child.
My mother often read me to sleep with “bedtime stories”, many of which were Bible stories.
No one at my house ate before saying “grace” or slept before saying prayers.
I attended Penfield Presbyterian Church and summer Bible school throughout most of my childhood.
I had parts in the Christmas plays and sang all the hymns and Christmas Carols that we all loved to hear, and I still enjoy many of them. Even today, when I walk or run with a certain rhythm, I find myself humming various Christian hymns that I'd sung and heard as a child.
I got into serious Bible study as a teenager, mostly out of a fear of Armageddon and the impending torture and slaughter of the “true believers” that some of the Christian radio programs were constantly preaching was soon to occur.
This was around 1962, during the height of the Cold War, and I was 14 years old.
Fear is a powerful motivator. I remember thinking,when the time comes, will I be strong enough to refuse the “Mark of the Beast”, endure the “Great Tribulation” and denounce the Anti Christ.
Russia was then claimed to be the “Big Bear” to the North in “Bible Prophecy”, which centered on the books of Isaiah, Daniel and Revelation. The Catholic Church was preached to be the “Great Whore of Babylon.”
I calculated that it might take about 20 years before I'd have to deal with the worst of it, and that by then I'd be a old as my father was.... and since he seemed to be able to stand up to anything, I figured that, at that advanced age, I would be able to stand firm in my belief also.
I pushed most of the fear to the back of my mind during my 4 years at Penn State, but continued to pray regularly, read and study the Bible, and anxiously watch the news throughout my twenties and thirties.
(There is a huge other “marriage and family with children” story in here too, but I'll just focus on the personal “belief” topic).
It was beginning to look like the Rapture and Armageddon were going to take longer than I had originally thought.
It wasn't until my early forties, that I happened upon a small book in the DuBois library entitled The Historical Approach to the Bible by Howard Teeple.
Here is a link to some recent reviews of that book at amazon.com
It was the first book that I had ever read that looked at the origins and history of the Bible and Christianity from the viewpoint of an impartial historian.
Published in 1992, it was the result of 50 years of scholarly research by Dr. Howard Teeple who was the executive director of the Religion and Ethics Institute in Evanston, Illinois. He held a Ph.D. in the field from the University of Chicago.
All of my life, I had never believed in “belief,”... simply for “belief's sake”.
I had always just been absolutely certain that the Christian world view was the only “reasonable” one to hold.
All of the evidence I had seen, the study that I had done, all of the people I had listened to, and all of the Bible verses I been been directed toward ..all fell neatly into place and had formed, “for me”, a simple, clear and sensible picture of my life, my meaning, and of the purpose of the Universe.
But Teeple's book was “Out of the box”! At least it was out of MY box.
He traced the history of how the Bible had literally been constructed over “hundreds of years” by the various early Christian Church councils. Man made? I had always thought that God made it and men had just copied it.
Now I was finding out that, after the death of Jesus, and with the the Roman Emperor Constantine declaring Christianity the State Religion of the mega powerful Roman Empire, groups of men had begun to gather together at numerous Church councils, discussing and fighting over which religious writings to include and which to reject... as the official Christian Church doctrine. The results were then put to vote.
And the voting results were seldom unanimous,.... with well meaning, intelligent men (always men) often bitterly in disagreement over selection and interpretation of basically, what constituted..........
“God's Word.”
Teeple's book also pointed out various inconsistencies and contradictions in the resulting “Holy Bible” ....errors that one would expect to find in any project put together by groups of mortal men, but
that was the real shocker for me!
I had been certain for my entire life that the Bible was the infallible, inerrant Word of God,... and if even “one small piece” of it was found to be reasonably and demonstrably false or contradictory.....then my entire world view, 40 some years in the making, was going to go down the tubes!
I spent the next few years investigating these alleged “errors” and “discrepancies”, from the perspective of other historians and writers as well as from the viewpoint of the Christian researchers, or “apologists.”
I found out that the few things that Teeple had pointed out were just the tip of a huge iceberg, consisting of many disputed interpretations and incompatible and unresolved doctrines that are today all lumped together and called Christianity,.... along with an equal number of different competing and diverse descriptions that somehow, today, all manage to come together under the blanket title ..God.
It became clear to me then why there are now some many branches of Christianity....uncertainty and disagreement over the various interpretations of the multiple interpretations of the book and the doctrine..... which I was amazed to find out was not even officially finalized until the Council of Trent of 1546...... in response to the the doctrinal challenges of Martin Luther.
So it turns out that the Catholic Christian “faith” was not even “officially defined”completely until less than 500 years ago... and once again, by a committee of mortal men, just like you and me.
Since then the Protestants have taken their various interpretations and disagreements, and branched off in all directions. Wikipedia notes anywhere from 8 to 33 thousand Protestant denominations in 238 countries, with maybe 300 new ones being added each year. And no two of them believe exactly the same thing about the Bible and God. They can't all be right, but they can all be wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant#Major_groupings
I learned that other religions of the world were also internally uncertain and confused in the interpretations of their sacred texts and doctrines... witness recently the Shia and Sunnis of Islam for example.
It occurred to me that if I had been raised in a Muslim family, exposed only to Muslim teachings, and taught to avoid and ignore the evil that “must necessarily lurk” within anything or anybody who contradicts Muslim beliefs........then “believing totally” in the Muslim Faith would be perfectly reasonable, and I would probably have lived my entire life without a shred of doubt about it, as I'm sure most Muslims do today.
Substitute the word Christian for Muslim in the above paragraph, and that is exactly what had happened to me.
I began to feel very, very fortunate that I had been born into an open society of diversity and multiple viewpoints, and with the freedom to investigate any of them that I might choose.
My upbringing and education had always been supportive of my natural curiosity and my respect for reason and evidence in search of truth.
I felt some regret, however, that it had taken me so long to begin to venture out of my comfortable cocoon of false certainty.
I'm now convinced that the main organized religions of the world function mostly as control mechanisms to keep the people in line. They promise the best imaginable rewards and threaten the worst possible punishments, and actively discourage dissent and doubt among their followers. They utilize regular "belief maintenance" programs to pro-actively minimize
I now often watch and listen to the numerous lectures and debates online between the passionate believers and the fervent nonbelievers. There are usually convincing points made by both sides.
I still enjoy reading and evaluating the latest arguments from the latest religious thinkers and writers, but I'm increasingly more convinced by the arguments made by the so-called New Atheists.....Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, whose books have recently been topping the New York Times Best Seller list.
Dan Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He, in particular, is doing very interesting research and writings on the Evolutionary roots of “Belief.”
He has also noted that very few people really act as if they believe in an ever present deity/God actually existing.
Most people act more like they “believe in Belief”...they think it's a good thing, and they think everyone else should too.
But they carry on with their lives just as the would if no deity actually existed.
I often see that happening myself.
I'm still open to evaluation of any new evidence that a “deity” of some sort might exist, but so far I haven't been convinced. The so called “Problem of Evil” argument, in particular, has pretty much forced me to rule out the existence of any “All Loving” deities.
see... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
I've never met a person so unloving that they could stand by and watch a small child suffer for hours, even days, until death.... without that person doing everything in their power to help.
Yet in nearly every large natural disaster, earthquake or flood, if a powerful, loving deity actually did exist... then that must be exactly what he is doing.
I just can't seem to twist that fact into “love”.... of any kind.... no matter how hard I've tried.
The aftermath cleanups are usually pretty grisly.Gary Llewellyn
vlgl@verizon.net
I had “believed” in the Christian world view simply because the information that I had been studying and focusing on had made a perfectly reasonable case for believing that way.
This one small, well researched and reasonably written book made me aware, for the first time in my life, that there was a whole lot of historically accurate information available about all Religions, not just Christianity, investigated and written from a neutral unbiased viewpoint. I also realized that almost every one of those religions considers all the others to be false or even evil.
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